How To Build A Sleep Tech Startup - w/ Supreeth

Supreeth describes Serene AI as a sleep-wellness startup that changed shape after the founders began speaking with users and working with mentor Curtis Carlson. The product concept was a personalized AI that learns through journaling and recommends bedtime patterns. At the time, they were exploring both software and hardware, including ways to make disengaging from the day feel inviting rather than clinical.

The target was the behavior before sleep: endless information intake, social scrolling, and waiting until exhaustion forces the night to end. Supreeth imagined replacing that loop with conversation, simple games, sleep-oriented stories, sound, or scent. These were product ideas and early observations, not medical treatment claims, and the episode does not establish that the product diagnoses or cures insomnia.

The idea began while Supreeth and his co-founder were working late as research assistants at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. They noticed that despite long hours, they still talked before bed instead of falling asleep immediately. That conversation helped them decompress. They wondered what a person living alone could use to exchange the day's information and create a deliberate transition into sleep.

Their first answer was a conversational AI that would ask questions and combine the exchange with elements such as ASMR. Supreeth later calls their original thinking technically biased: as engineers, they kept asking what they could build instead of which problem a customer actually needed solved. Interviews before and after product use became the method for correcting that bias.

The minimum viable product was a mobile application with journaling and basic sleep coaching, including suggestions about habits such as caffeine timing. It was intentionally simple and had no revenue. Before testing with people through the university, the team sought approval from WPI's Institutional Review Board and explained the workflow without disclosing every proprietary detail.