The Launch of First-Ever Camera That Measures Sleep Behavior and Patterns - Nanit

Press release: 2016

Today, Nanit brings consumers the first Baby-Safe smart monitor that uses machine learning to provide sleep insights through first-of-its-kind camera vision. Nanit provides comprehensive sleep reports that actually measure a baby's behavior throughout the night without requiring any kind of wearable component. The camera has been uniquely designed to track and analyze baby sleep patterns using smart algorithms and an elegant design solution with the highest safety standards.

Nanit is also announcing a $6.6M seed round of financing, led by Upfront Ventures with participation from RRE, 645 Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures (former Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang), Flex and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute.

The need for improved sleep for both parents and babies is clear. On average, parents lose 44 days of sleep during the first year of their baby's life and nearly 3 in 10 babies is reported to have problems sleeping at night. Nanit CEO and co-founder Assaf Glazer realized the need for a technology to better measure infant sleep, and also provide parents with actionable information to not only improve their child's sleep, but their sleep as well.

"Like most scientists, I'm driven by curiosity. When I had my son 4 years ago, I really wanted to understand his behavior, make sure he was safe and healthy, and be the best parent to him that I could. And if I could get some sleep while accomplishing all of this, even better," said Dr. Assaf Glazer. "That's what sparked my idea to apply my experience building intelligent cameras to my struggles at home and create the first baby monitor that can help parents truly connect with and understand their kids. We've added in all of the features that parents like ourselves would want, and we've found that by helping our babies sleep better, we sleep better too."

Nanit doesn't come with sensors, bands, or egregious notifications. The camera goes beyond mere baby surveillance by creating benchmarks, counting sleep interruptions and contextualizing milestones in individual sleep environments to show everyone involved in baby's care not just whether the baby is sleeping, but how well. Nanit's features include:

• Sleep Quality Scores with Daily and Nightly Summaries -- Tracks and understands 4 scientific measures of sleep, including sleep patterns, parent interventions, sleep onset, and total hours of sleep
• High-Quality Live Stream -- Real-time HD quality video is optimized for night vision and also provides time-lapse videos of baby throughout the day
• Camera -- A bird's-eye view provides the best possible perspective, and also contains a built-in nightlight and lullaby sound box
• Safe and Secure -- Protected by extensive security measures including AES 256-bit symmetric-key encryption, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and secure HTTP access (HTTPS) using TLS/SSL. In addition, Nanit is the only device on the market that is HIPAA compliant.
• Sharing Capabilities -- Allows parents to share activity and learnings with multiple members of the family and designated caregivers. Parents can control how much information an added user can access
• Companion App -- Delivers actionable sleeping insights, event-triggered video summaries, behavioral analysis and parenting tips to your device. The app also provides a heat map demonstrating where your baby moved in the crib throughout the day

Nanit has also been rigorously beta-tested by a group of thirty families for the last six months, with very positive results.

"I love the sleep quality insights I get from Nanit because they help me better manage my day. For example, if I look at it in the morning and see she didn't have a good night, I know she'll need an extra nap," said Keren M., Great Neck, NY. "Because of the quality, I'm also able to see things that I wouldn't be able to with any other kind of camera, like if my baby is able to self-soothe, woke up in the night and didn't cry, or if the nanny put her down at the proper time. I feel it's my responsibility as a parent to be aware of my kid's daily routine, no matter where I am or who is taking care of her."

The company was co-founded by Dr. Assaf Glazer, Tor Ivry, and Andrew Berman. Glazer spent the last 15 years making cameras smarter with advanced computer vision and machine learning algorithms. He received his PhD from Technion in Israel and later used his skills in the field of machine learning and computer vision to create what would become Nanit while a Runway Startup Postdoc at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Prior to Nanit, Tor held senior positions at Philips and Applied Materials, where he and Glazer were colleagues, and Berman worked as an investor at Norwest Venture Partners.

The Nanit camera will retail for $329, but for a limited time only is available at a discounted price of $249. Nanit's analytics subscription model is $10.00 per month, but will be offered at a 50% discount for customers who choose to purchase the one-year package at checkout, for $50 total.

Nanit Plus - Smart Baby Monitor and Wall Mount: Camera with HD Video & Audio - Sleep Tracking - Night Vision - Temperature & Humidity Sensors and Two-Way Audio