fascia’s goal: to make accessing comprehensive sleep data easier than ever before
Founded in 2023 by PhD Student (now CEO) Guillermo Bernal, fascia sleep was born as a spin-out of Bernal’s ongoing research at the MIT Media Lab. After suffering from disrupted sleep throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Bernal sought to apply his expertise in brain computer interface and wearable technology. Upon graduation in 2023, Bernal participated in MIT’s delta v accelerator where he connected with now COO Jake Steckler, an MBA student at MIT Sloan. Together, the dynamic team is now on a mission to revolutionize how sleep data is collected, and to improve the standard of care for all.
Fascia aims to solve the widely-known problems that plague the current standard of care in sleep study. Despite the statistic that 1 in 3 Americans suffer from a sleep disorder, a staggering 80% of those disorders go undiagnosed; and the inefficient system of care that exists today leads to an estimated $94B (billion!) of additional healthcare costs for insurers. Why? Fascia posits that providers currently have no scalable solution for routine, comprehensive sleep analysis. Existing solutions–while once novel and helpful to so many–are no longer serving the industry as intended. In-lab sleep studies are costly, burdensome, and on average take 6 months or more to be conducted; and current at-home alternatives are limited in scope and data insights, and ultimately are not comparable tools to the cumbersome in-lab studies.
Through a combination of a mask-like component and generalist AI and foundational models, fascia is making sleep analysis as routine as blood work. Fascia sleep is able to match the critical datapoints needed for an effective sleep study–EEG, EOG, EMG, EDA blood oxygen, etc–while actually providing multi-night data in your familiar home environment, rather than a single night’s worth of data which is often compromised by the discomfort of an in-lab session. What does this mean for the industry? A better experience for patients, providers, and payers. Patients benefit from a familiar form factor (a sleep mask) and the comfort of their typical sleep environment, providers benefit from superior data insights, and payers benefit from reduced overhead lab costs, reduced equipment cost, and remediation of the associated costs of both under-referrals and over-referrals of sleep studies.
NEMIC and fascia: Championing a Major Innovation in Sleep Study
In 2023, NEMIC became connected with fascia through MIT Sandbox–a program designed to connect entrepreneurs with industry experts. NEMIC worked with fascia on the development of their pitch deck and financial/investor readiness, as they work through their various stages of fundraising. Fascia participated in NEMIC’s 2023 Q4 Pitch Event, which featured MedTech, HealthTech, and Life Science startups in the Rhode Island entrepreneurial ecosystem. Through ecosystem collaborations, fascia is now working with close partner and NEMIC Corporate Member Nova Design for market-ready product development.
To date, fascia has raised $450k in SAFEs and $100k in non-dilutive grants, and has received support from the likes of Harvard innovation labs, the MIT-Pillar AI Collective, MassChallenge, Forge, and others. Fascia continues to gain momentum through their presentations at EMBC Conference, Sleep 2023 Conference, as well as planned collaborations in the sports sector due facia’s wide-spread implications of sleep with athletes. A pilot study is underway at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and future collaborations are planned for next year with sleep research labs across Massachusetts, including Harvard Medical School and UMass Amherst. Fascia is currently raising $1M in SAFEs to allow for 18 months of runway, culminating in their official launch in 2025. Stay connected with NEMIC to hear the latest updates of fascia, and others from our network.
