China exports RMB 10 billion (USD 1.5 billion) worth of mattresses each year. For years, however, the companies that defined the smart mattress category emerged elsewhere.
One of the sector’s early standouts was an amateur athlete from Ferrara, a small city in Italy. In 2014, he and his wife founded Eight Sleep in New York. The company now generates about USD 500 million in annual revenue and is valued at USD 1.5 billion.
Yet much of Eight Sleep’s manufacturing and R&D takes place thousands of kilometers away in China’s Pearl River Delta. Having seen firsthand its sales traction, Chinese companies began entering the category.
At the start of this year, Stareep, a smart mattress brand within the Dreame ecosystem, said it had completed a second funding round worth nearly RMB 100 million (USD 14.6 million), giving it a post-money valuation of RMB 1 billion (USD 146.2 million). The round came roughly three months after its angel financing.
The pace of funding, to some extent, reflects a broader reassessment of the smart bed category.
Sleep monitoring has long been viewed as a sizable market. A March 2025 survey by the Chinese Sleep Research Society found that about 48.5% of adults in China report sleep-related problems, with more than 300 million people experiencing sleep disorders.
Atour sells roughly three million pillows annually, with retail revenue accounting for about half of its business. Mattresses, with higher average selling prices, present a larger commercial opportunity.
“When we studied market acceptance of smart mattresses two years ago, most users were still in a wait-and-see mode. In offline retail settings, the average time from product introduction to purchase was about two hours. Now, it takes only half an hour,” Stareep president Cai Yanming told 36Kr.
For years, “smart beds” were largely synonymous with electric beds, with intelligence limited to posture adjustment. A newer generation is beginning to incorporate artificial intelligence more deeply. Using algorithms and continuous sensing, these products adjust in real time to improve sleep quality, shifting the bed from a standardized product to one that adapts to individual users.
A 2025 white paper found that Chinese adults sleep an average of 6.85 hours a night. Stress-related insomnia, “revenge bedtime procrastination” linked to phone use, and late nights shaped by the pace of urban life have all cut into sleep time.
Cai said shorter sleep duration is the broader backdrop. In that context, improving sleep means focusing on sleep quality.
The scope for change in traditional mattresses, at least in structure and support, is limited. In common sleeping positions such as lying on one’s side, the shoulders and legs can be subject to excessive localized pressure. Even slightly poor posture can cause people to wake with back pain or numb legs, a longstanding user problem that has often been overlooked.
Stareep’s approach is to treat the mattress as a continuously operating sensing system. Its adaptive mattress contains an AI chip that detects pressure distribution, body contours, and changes in sleeping posture in real time, then sends that data to multiple independent adjustment units inside the mattress. Based on how force is distributed across different sleeping positions, the system adjusts key pressure-bearing areas so support stays aligned with the body’s condition.
To make those adjustments during sleep, without disrupting rest, Stareep said it optimized the hardware.
The R&D team drew on Dreame’s experience in motors, electric drive systems, and electronic controls, and co-developed a bed frame adjustment system with Dreame engineers. Through a patented motor and structural design, the bed frame can adjust with almost no jerking, while operating noise is kept at about 20 decibels, close to the lower limit of human perception.
In this system, the mattress and bed frame no longer operate independently. Instead, they work together across the full sleep cycle: helping users relax and fall asleep through posture adjustment before bed, making near-imperceptible adjustments during sleep in response to snoring or pressure changes, and waking users more naturally afterward.
Only when it is quiet enough and natural enough can intelligent adjustment improve sleep, rather than become another smart device that users must adapt to.
Compared with pillows, mattress purchases still happen largely in offline stores.
To speed up the in-store trial process, Stareep has introduced its Matchfit system. After a user lies down for five or six minutes, the system combines body data, pressure distribution, and a basic sleep model to recommend a more suitable firmness plan.
Stareep said the process is supported by an AI agent trained on a sample base in the millions. It can support not only adaptive smart mattresses, but also provide more predictable purchase recommendations for buyers of traditional mattresses.
Once the product is in use, the mattress continuously records each user’s nightly sleep performance, generates sleep reports and scores, and learns from long-term user data, allowing its adjustment plans to become more personalized over time.
Stareep is also extending its monitoring functions to devices such as smart rings, ambient lights, smart pillows, and temperature-control fitted sheets. That would link daytime physical data with nighttime mattress data. Exercise data captured by a user’s smart ring during the day, for example, could be incorporated into how the mattress responds at night.
Stareep’s rising valuation is not an isolated case. Eight Sleep closed a USD 50 million financing round earlier this year. Today Yixiu Technology, founded by former Xiaomi executive Wang Teng, also completed financing worth an eight-figure RMB sum within days of its establishment.
Traditional home furnishing brands are also working with software companies:
- Sleemon has teamed up with BrainCo to launch a smart mattress that integrates with a brain-computer interface.
- Keeson Technology has released a new smart bed product under Softide, deepening its coordination with the HarmonyOS ecosystem.
- Qushui Science and Technology, which works closely with Xiaomi’s ecosystem chain, has joined hands with DeepSeek to launch a professional sleep analysis service.
Smart mattresses are not a new category. By the time internet-of-things technology entered the mainstream in 2013, the sector had already gone through one boom cycle. It later lost momentum, as product performance proved inconsistent while prices remained high, limiting its appeal beyond early adopters.
This time, although major brands are rolling out a wide range of features, the industry still faces a critical test. To become a mass market category, smart beds must show, from medical and clinical perspectives, that they can meaningfully address sleep disorders rather than simply serve as expensive psychological reassurance.
KrASIA features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Qiao Yujie for 36Kr.
Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.84 = USD 1 based on estimates as of April 13, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are presented for ease of reference and may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.