Everyone deserves a good night’s sleep: Munice CEO

Insomnia is a common clinical phenomenon in modern societies profoundly affecting many people’s health and well-being, and South Korean startup Munice Inc. is on a mission to rescue about one-third, even as high as half, of the global population suffering sleepless nights.

Founded in 2021, Munice offers a sound-based sleep-aid app, named Nightly, which ranked No. 1 in the App Store’s Health/Fitness category in Korea earlier this month, having become the go-to sleep app among Koreans, according to the Korean sleep-tech startup.

Launched in April 2022, this popular, paid sleep-promoting app is now gearing up to take on a bigger market, the United States, said the startup founder.

“The US is our key market,” Shawny Kwon, the founder and chief executive of Munice, said in a recent interview with The Korea Economic Daily.

“If we become a dominant player in the US, the world’s biggest sleep-tech market where demand for sleep aids is the world’s highest, our global expansion should pick up speed.”

According to RAND, a US nonprofit global policy think tank, nearly one in four American adults have suffered clinical insomnia symptoms.

Munice set up its headquarters office in the US in January 2022 after incorporating its Korean entity in October 2021.

NEUROSCIENCE AND MONAURAL BEATS

Nightly is a sleep-promoting app that taps into neuroscience-based, AI-assisted frequencies to align a user’s brain waves with optimal patterns for deep sleep, according to Munice.

At the core of its technology are monaural beats — special sounds created when two different tones are played together. The human brain hears these combined tones as a single sound that can influence brain waves.

The best-known benefit of monaural beats is lessened anxiety, and Munice has developed its patented monaural beats for Nightly.

Its patented monaural beat helps people fall asleep 18 minutes faster than traditional monaural beats and extends the average nightly deep-sleep duration by 1.7 to 1.8 times, according to a study by Yonsei University’s Center for Cognitive Science.

Sleep stage-tracking records from Fitbit devices show that a normal amount of deep sleep per night is one hour, or 13% of an eight-hour sleep cycle, Kwon said.

The strength of Nightly is the ability to offer Nightly users personalized sleep sounds catering to their unique sleep environments thanks to AI technology. 

“Based on more than 1.7 million datasets, Nightly recommends the best tune for each user,” said Kwon.

Munice continually tracks, compiles and reviews the ideal combination of sound data for different users to provide the best-personalized recommendations, the CEO explained.

ALREADY DOMINANT PLAYER AT HOME

The number of Nightly users is steadily growing, said Kwon, adding that the app’s retention rate exceeds the average for the health/fitness software as a service (SaaS) category.

Nightly’s base of monthly active users stands at about 90,000.

Its annual recurring revenue topped $1 million recently after ranking first in revenue in the health/fitness category in December 2023, Kwon said.

“Nightly has no formidable competitor in Korea,” she said.

Backed by its impressive takeoff at home, Munice has cranked up its efforts to advance into the US market since September, according to the Korean startup’s CEO.

The startup plans to make Nightly one of the leading sleep-aid apps for US college students by June next year under a go-to-market strategy and will initiate performance marketing in the country shortly afterwards, Kwon said.

Munice is also considering entering Asian countries such as India, Japan and Vietnam later.

Its aggressive global push also grabbed the attention of The Asan Nanum Foundation earlier this year, which invited the startup to Asan Voyager, a program designed to assist Korean startups entering the US by providing acceleration, coaching, community learning and long-term residency support.

PRE-A FUNDING 

To drive its global expedition, Munice kicked off a pre-Series A-2 funding round in June to raise about 1 billion won ($720,000) from venture capitalists at home and abroad.

“Silicon Valley-based Samsung NEXT and Tokyo-based Z Venture Capital have already committed,” said Kwon.

Munice plans to use the proceeds to tap resources for global go-to-market strategies in different countries and enhance Nightly's personalized recommendation service.

It aims to complete the pre-A-2 funding next month.

In January 2023, Munice completed a pre-A-1 round, which garnered investment from multiple investors including Digital Healthcare Partners. 

“Everyone deserves a good night’s sleep,” said Kwon, who developed Nightly after suffering years of insomnia.   

“We want to make Nightly a service that can help revitalize someone’s daily life through quality sleep and make their dreams come true.”

Write to Sookyung Seo at skseo@hankyung.com
Joel Levin edited this article.