Big sleep’s final frontier is your nose

White noise, blackout curtains, and enough melatonin to sedate a rhinoceros aren't enough to help some of us sleep — so a handful of sleep tech startups are looking to a new sensory frontier: smell.

A new wave of companies is betting the fastest route to sleep runs through your nose:

• Israeli company Kimba just raised $6.5m, selling a bedside device that puffs AI-tuned scents your way throughout the night.
  
• Memory Air manufactures a neuroscientist-developed device that wafts 40 secret essential oils past your face all night to improve both sleep and brain health.

Nothing to sniff at

Nearly half of American adults report always or often experiencing disrupted sleep due to stress, and the global sleep tech device market is expected to grow to over $160B by 2035, headed by some prominent incumbents:

• Intelligent bed-cooling manufacturer Eight Sleep recently closed a $50m strategic funding round at a $1.5B valuation.
  
• And Oura (as you saw in today's news) is eyeing an IPO at a $16B+ valuation.

The market is growing, but its whitespace can seem limited. The smell-to-sleep pipeline is mostly uncharted territory.

Can you smell what this tech is cooking?

Sleep tech's effectiveness can be tough to prove. You're not conscious while it's operating — so the prospect of a scent-driven sleep machine might smell like BS to some.

That said, these companies back their tech with some impressive claims on the science behind them:

• Memory Air cites research from UC Irvine that links overnight olfactory stimulation to a 226% improvement in human memory.
  
• Kimba claims its adaptive AI can deliver different scents based on how they impact your sleep over time.

Ultimately, these outlets are taking a bold, evidence-backed approach in a market driven by human necessity.

That's nothing to thumb your nose at.