Asleep forms partnership with National Sleep Foundation of US

South Korea's sleep technology startup Asleep, which was part of an economic delegation accompanying President Yoon Suk Yeol's recent state visit to the US, on Monday said it signed a memorandum of understanding with the Washington-based National Sleep Foundation and Stanford University's medical school in Northern California.

This agreement was concluded on April 25 at an event for small and medium venture entrepreneurs hosted by the South Korean Ministry of SMEs and Startups in Washington. Based on this partnership, Asleep will start creating a "sleep tech cluster."

The ministry recently presented a blueprint for forming the K-Bio Lab Hub in the Songdo district of Incheon modeled after the Boston biotech cluster of the US, which includes the schools Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and global pharmaceutical companies Merck and Pfizer.

Asleep will form a system linking industrial, academic and research cooperation by supervising the hub's sleep sector.

"Partnerships with research institutions and academia concluded during the visit to the US and continuing relationships domestically with Seoul National University's main and Bundang hospitals will serve as an important foundation for the creation of the sleep tech cluster," Asleep CEO Lee Dong-heon said.

Asleep was founded in July 2020 by Lee, who was pursuing a master's in artificial intelligence (AI) at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). A serial entrepreneur born in 1994, he failed in his first two startups, a legal advisory service and another for an AI-based battery performance inspection.

As his third startup, Asleep possesses the technology to diagnose sleep quality by analyzing through AI the breathing sound of a sleeper simply by turning on a smartphone, with no need for a separate device.

In 2021, American retail giant Amazon chose Asleep as a cooperative startup, a first for a company in South Korea. This year, the startup plans to add a function that assists sleep to its self-developed app Sleep Routine.

Write to See-Eun Lee at see@hankyung.com