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This 25-year-old is building an Eight Sleep killer.
Harry Gestetner sold his last company, Fanfix, for $65M at the age of 21. Now he's running Orion, a smart mattress cover that's done 8 figures in annualized revenue in four months on the market, raised $23M from Mucker Capital, the Poppi founders, Square's Jim McKelvey, and more.
Harry is taking direct aim at Eight Sleep’s $3,000, subscription-locked Pod.
His pitch = better specs, $1,000 cheaper, and no forced subscription.
Keep reading for my hot take at the end. 🌶️
Building the greatest sleep brand
Harry founded Fanfix in late 2020 while at Tulane university, after seeing what was happening on TikTok: a whole generation of creators with massive distribution, but no real way to monetize. So he built a monetization engine for the creator economy.
It’s like OnlyFans, but the clean version.
By June 2022, SuperOrdinary acquired Fanfix for $65M, and Harry joined as Chief Digital Officer. From there, they went on a tear, scaling to $100M+ in revenue, 8-figure EBITDA, and 20M+ users.
Despite the glamor perceived from the outside, he worked 7 days a week. Laptop opened the moment he woke up and closed the moment he went to bed.
His body broke first. He started having severe vertigo, seeing doctor after doctor with no diagnosis.
Harry decided to take his health into his own hands and started getting serious about longevity. Like most tech founders, he started tracking his sleep with Oura and Whoop.
Both did the same thing. They told him he’d slept badly, made him feel guilty about it, and then did nothing to actually fix it.
The breakthrough moment came after he met Dr. Michael Breus, the most-cited sleep doctor in the world.
Body temperature is the #1 controllable component of sleep quality.
There’s a massive opportunity to create a sleep product that can make a meaningful impact on sleep quality by sensing and optimizing body temperature throughout the night.
That insight led to the founding of Orion, a smart cover that fits over any standard mattress. Embedded sensors track heart rate, breathing rate, and sleep stages, while AI builds a personalized thermal profile. Orion can cool to 50°F and heat to 115°F, with dual-zone control for couples who fight over the AC.
Here is a quote from Harry that perfectly captured the thesis:
"Longevity has three pillars: sleep, diet, and exercise. Diet and exercise have dozens of trusted, multi-billion-dollar brands. Sleep? I can’t think of any.
Oura and Whoop reached unicorn status by telling you that you slept badly. The number of people who actually want to sleep better is a much larger multiple of that."
Measurement got Oura and Whoop to unicorn status. Fixing sleep should be a decacorn slot, and that slot is empty.
In April 2025, Harry co-founded Orion with his dad, Daniel Gestetner. Dr. Breus also joined as Chief Sleep Officer.
Product and growth journey
1/ Positioning as the Tesla for sleep
While it’s still a niche category, the smart mattress cover market isn’t entirely new. Eight Sleep is the unicorn in the space, alongside a few other competing brands.
However, the biggest issue in this space is accessibility. Brands like Eight Sleep costs $3K+ upfront and then charges hundreds per year for a mandatory membership subscription.
Harry wants to build the Tesla of sleep, making it accessible while maintaining elite performance.
"We're building the Tesla of sleep. Our current product is our Model S, high-end and expensive. We want to get to our Model 3, a product in every American household. I'd like to get to a $500 price point eventually."
Orion is currently priced at ~$2K, 30% cheaper than Eight Sleep.
Beyond the initial price, Orion also differentiates by offering:
No forced subscription. All core features are usable even without subscription.
100% approval financing. Covers the entire purchase and improves accessibility.
At-home Sleep Disruption Test. Low commitment way to understand your sleep with an at home smart device and an Orion sleep consultant. Data will also be used to personalize the smart cover from night one.
Better hardware specs. Colder lows. Warmer highs. 47% smaller footprint.
2/ Success = missionary team + mercenary focus
As a second time founder, he understood the importance of focus, especially in consumer hardware.
They only worked on one product, the smart cover. Since the market demand was already validated, Harry and his team had a one single goal: building the most accessible smart cover that beats competitors on every product benchmark.
To achieve the price they need and minimize tariff disruptions, they decided to do everything inhouse, from engineering, component sourcing, proprietary sensors, industrialization.
Orion’s early prototype
They also implemented a culture that combines a mercenary instinct and missionary culture.
"There's missionary versus mercenary, engineering culture versus sales culture. They're seen as at odds. That is wrong. You've got to have both."
Their first hire was the CFO, which is unheard of in startups. Their entire business is in a financial model.
Every employee at Orion has access to the financial model in real time. The entire company is structured in a way to optimize for capital efficiency.
3/ Orion’s growth playbook
Orion's first 100 customers came from Harry personally being in the weeds, in Reddit comments, Instagram DMs, and every customer support call.
He wanted to make sure there was a small group of people who truly loved the product, and he achieved exactly that. Some customers even cried on the phone as they shared how much Orion had changed their lives, and others saved for months just to be able to buy it.
Over time, organic word of mouth started to pick up, which was amplified by Orion’s unique branding.
There are two types of brands according to Harry:
Brands that make you feel like you don’t deserve the product (e.g. Rolex)
Brands that work so well you almost feel embarrassed to use them (e.g. Kraft mac and cheese)
Most longevity brands are in the first camp, inaccessible and make people feel like they don’t belong. Harry wants to build for the second camp, the trusted, slightly-embarrassing-to-love product.
Within 4 months of launch, Orion Sleep had reached 8-figure in annualized revenue. It raised $23M in total from Mucker Capital and several angels like Poppi’s founders.
🌶️ My take on Orion
I was an Oura customer for two years, and before that, I used Whoop. I know exactly what Harry is trying to solve because I’ve lived it.
Every morning, it was the same ritual. I’d roll over, open the app, check my readiness score, get told I slept badly, feel a little worse about myself, and then go do absolutely nothing about it.
The wearable industry sold me a guilt subscription.
That's why the future of consumer hardware looks a lot more like Orion than Oura/Whoop to me. Products that proactively help you change behavior, not just remind you that you're falling short of an ideal you can't reach on your own.
I also love the "Tesla for smart mattress covers" framing. If Harry can pull off the $500 price point, the way Tesla pulled off the Model 3, the TAM gets a lot bigger.
What also impressed me is the operational culture. Hiring a CFO first is unheard of for a startup. Building everything in-house, from engineering, sensors, to supply chain, gives them control over every part of the product. The company runs on radical transparency, with the financial model visible to every employee, and the whole org is optimized around one north star: building the most accessible smart cover on the market.
That said, I anticipate some real challenges ahead.
Eight Sleep is more expensive, but it has clinical backing from 50+ studies, integrations with Apple Watch and Oura, and several years’ head start on data. Credibility matters more in sleep than in most categories because people are trusting you with eight hours of their day.
As Orion scales, Eight Sleep or other new entrants could also launch a cheaper, subscription-free tier and close the gap quickly. It’s also worth noting that Eight Sleep sued Orion at the end of last year over patent infringement. Depending on how it plays out, it could force a product redesign and potentially erode Orion’s price advantage.
Inventory is the other thing I'd watch. Meeting demand is hard enough. Dealing with returns, defects, and warranty exposure on water-tubing hardware is harder, and those costs scale ugly.
Still, I’d not bet against Harry. He’s a proven winner, a second-time founder who notched a $65M exit at 21. The Orion team is laser-focused on accessibility and performance for a single product, with a clear organizational alignment.
I’m hoping that Orion can pull it off.
I am tired of paying for guilt.
See you next week,
Leo
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