Matteo Franceschetti

Matteo Franceschetti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, the sleep-fitness company he started in 2014 alongside Alexandra Zatarain, Massimo Andreasi Bassi, and Andrea Ballarini. Under his leadership, Eight Sleep has raised roughly $323M from investors including Y Combinator, Comcast Ventures, and Founders Fund, and reached a reported valuation of around $1.5B, becoming one of the best-known names in sleep and recovery technology. He holds multiple patents in tech and health and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.

Franceschetti grew up in Italy and trained as a lawyer before becoming a founder. He earned a Law degree, graduating magna cum laude, from the University of Ferrara, was admitted to the Italian Bar, and practiced securities and finance law at two "Magic Circle" firms, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Allen & Overy. He was also a competitive athlete — a ski racer and tennis player as well as a race-car driver who competed in European hillclimb championships and finished third in the GT4 category at the 12 Hours of Abu Dhabi in a Maserati GT.

Before Eight Sleep, Franceschetti co-founded and led two companies in the renewable-energy / cleantech space — Global Investment (acquired in 2011) and GIR (acquired in 2014). That experience as a repeat, exited founder — combined with his own obsession with performance and recovery — shaped both his operating focus at Eight Sleep and his angel-investing interests. He has also served as a mentor at Techstars, Microsoft BizSpark, and the NYU Summer Launchpad program, and has been involved with FWD.us.

• Stage: Writes early checks — mostly pre-seed and seed, occasionally participating into Series A rounds.
• Check size: Typically $5K–$50K, clustering around ~$25K, consistent with an individual angel rather than a fund.
• Sectors he leans into: Health/wellness and human performance (a natural adjacency to Eight Sleep), plus frontier and "hard" tech — climate/cleantech (his own founding background), space, AI, and developer/productivity and fintech software.
• What earns a yes: As a repeat operator-founder, he tends to back mission-driven founders building in categories he understands deeply — quantified-self / longevity, performance optimization, and technically ambitious products.
• Note: No single publicly published thesis statement is available; his focus is inferred from his own founder background and his disclosed portfolio.