Shark Tank is pretty good at destroying the medical startups it puts on the show. It had more easy prey this week with Napwell, designed to make it easier to wake up from and avoid bad power naps.
“I’ve never had a bad power nap,” Shark Mark Cuban says during Napwell’s pitch.
Uh oh!
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Napwell is essentially a sleeping mask with lights (it did pretty well in a Kickstarter campaign). The company points out that people who wake up from deep sleep are groggy and often get headaches. The lights in Napwell’s mask gradually brighten and are meant to slowly wake you up from a nap at a lighter phase of sleep.
Napwell’s founders – two pretty smart guys who went to MIT and Stanford – use this logic: since people don’t get enough sleep, they nap. Napwell will help people take better naps and put a dent in the lack-of-sleep epidemic by delivering more quality sleep.
“We think there’s a gap in the market for wearable technology,” said Napwell co-founder Neil Joglekar, who like his business partner was clad in adult footie pajamas on the show.
The Sharks somehow restrain themselves from immediately investing in the runaway health wearables phenomenon. Instead, they all slowly drop out. Cuban cracks them for not seeking funding in Silicon Valley. Kevin O’Leary dismisses their inexperience in bringing a consumer product to market. Lori Greiner thinks the problem is going to sleep and not waking up.
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The real problem for Napwell is, though, that most people who CAN sleep more and don’t just don’t care they don’t sleep enough).
There’s hope we’ll see these founders again. Co-founder Justin Lee studied physics and biology at MIT, and is a PhD candidate in a joint Harvard-MIT program in health, sciences and technology. He completed recently completed a project developing drones for vaccine delivery.
“And you came up with this!” exclaimed Damon John.
