Ozlo doesn’t just want to help you fall asleep. It wants to own the data layer of your night.
The Boston-based startup behind the noise-masking Sleepbuds is quietly building what looks a lot less like a hardware company and a lot more like a sleep data platform — with SDKs, AI agents, clinical studies and even EEG in the pipeline.
At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, co-founder and CEO N.B. Patil walked through how all the pieces are starting to lock together.
From comfy earbuds to a sleep OS
Ozlo was founded by former Bose employees who didn’t just want to ship another wearable. Patil says the team always intended to build an ecosystem.
Instead of treating the companion app as a one-off, Ozlo built iOS and Android SDKs from day one. Their own first-party app runs on that same SDK.
“The way we did that from the beginning is we built the iOS and Android SDK — so our first-party app actually runs on that SDK. That means whatever you see in our app can be made available to anybody,” Patil told TechCrunch.
That decision is now turning Sleepbuds into a platform other apps can plug into.
Calm is the first big proof point
The most visible example so far: meditation and wellness giant Calm.
Calm can’t actually see when you fall asleep. It knows when you hit play and when you stop. Everything in between is a black box.
Ozlo’s hardware fills that gap.
Sleepbuds track body movement and respiration. That raw data is sent to the Ozlo charging case, which runs a machine-learning model to decide whether you’re awake, relaxed or asleep.
The case itself adds more context with temperature and light sensors. All of that can then be shared — in a controlled way — with partners like Calm.
Concrete example: you start a breathing exercise in Calm. Ozlo can see if your respiration rate drops and can report that back. If users aren’t calming down, Calm knows it may need to change the pattern or the content.
Patil frames it as a two-part loop:
- Real-time actions, like Ozlo’s feature that shuts off sounds once it detects you’re asleep.
- Strategic feedback so content creators know whether they’re “investing in the right content,” instead of just pumping out volume without field data.
For Ozlo, this also opens up a new revenue line beyond $200-ish hardware: if the Sleepbuds experience nudges you to upgrade to a Calm subscription, Ozlo can take a cut of that subscription.
Patil says the company is already talking with other sleep and meditation apps, but the same loop could work with therapy content or even audiobooks.
Tinnitus becomes a subscription business
About 15% of Ozlo’s customers report tinnitus — the constant ear-ringing that can wreck sleep.
Last year, Ozlo teamed up with Walter Reed Hospital on a clinical study. The finding: if you play the right masking frequency overnight for many weeks, you can effectively trick the brain into stopping the signals that create the ringing.
Ozlo is now turning that into a product. Tinnitus-focused therapies will be delivered as a paid subscription and are expected to roll out in the second quarter of 2026.
Building an AI ‘sleep buddy’
Ozlo is also leaning into AI as the interface for all this data.
In November, the company launched a feature called Sleep Patterns inside its app. It breaks down how long you sleep, how consistent your nights are over weeks, and what might be disturbing you.
Next up: an AI agent you can literally text with, positioned as a “sleep buddy.”
The company buried an Easter egg hinting at the name in the app. If you open and close the Sleepbuds case five times in a row, a small animated character called “buddy” sprints across the top of the screen.
By plugging into other wearables and Apple’s HealthKit, Ozlo wants this agent to understand more of your context — activity, heart rate, routines — and eventually talk to your smart home. Think: automatically adjusting your smart thermostat to your preferred sleep temperature when you open the case at night.
Those AI features are also targeted for the second quarter.
New hardware: better case, bigger sound, bedside speaker
Sleepbuds themselves are getting an upgrade.
One recurring annoyance: buds not seating correctly in the charger. Ozlo’s next-gen case changes the internal contours so the buds drop into place more reliably. The new case also adds a dedicated Bluetooth pairing button.
Under the hood, Ozlo is redesigning the antenna and extender for better range and adding an amplifier so the buds can get loud enough to mask plane or train noise when needed. The refreshed hardware is slated for Q2.
Ozlo is also moving beyond in-ear devices. A bedside speaker is on the roadmap for the same quarter.
The 4×6-inch speaker will include its own sensors, letting it do things like:
- Track how often you get up for bathroom breaks.
- Detect a fall and alert others.
Because it doesn’t go in the ear, the speaker lets Ozlo target two big groups: families with kids under 13 (who aren’t supposed to wear earbuds overnight) and older adults who may prefer a simple bedside device.
Longer term, Ozlo wants to add a wake-up light to its lineup, similar in spirit to the popular Hatch alarm clock. There’s no launch date for that light-equipped product yet.
The EEG play: from consumer gadget to medical device
Ozlo’s biggest swing may be in neurotech.
The 60-person, Boston-based startup recently acquired Segotia, an Ireland-based company building EEG-focused “hearable” tech.
The plan is to custom-design an ear tip that can pick up electrical signals from inside the ear. From those signals, Ozlo believes it can derive delta waves from the brain and infer what your brain is doing around sleep and awareness.
That opens two doors:
- Deeper, “brain-level” insights for consumer Sleepbuds.
- Longer-term, real-time sleep intervention tools that push Ozlo into regulated medical products.
A product that bakes in Segotia’s EEG tech is planned for 2027.
The race to ship — and raise
Ozlo’s roadmap for the next 18 months is crowded: SDK partnerships, tinnitus subscriptions, AI agents, new hardware, a bedside speaker and an EEG-powered device in development.
To keep the pace, the company will need to ship on time and keep customer satisfaction high, while also stepping into healthcare and subscription economics.
Patil says Ozlo is currently in the process of closing a Series B funding round, with more details expected in the coming month.
If it pulls that off, Sleepbuds might end up being less about blocking noise — and more about becoming one of the most data-rich windows into how, and whether, we actually sleep.
