Chris Fernandez, founding CEO of EnsoData, solves your sleep problems… with AI

About 54 million Americans and 936 million patients globally suffer from sleep apnea and 80% of cases go undiagnosed. Today’s guest is fixing that problem.

Chris Fernandez co-founded EnsoData in June 2015 to use AI to make sleep studies more efficient, cost effective, and accurate.

Since then, he and the team have raised more than $30M from an exceptional group of investors including Zetta Venture Partners, M25 Ventures, and Inspire Medical Systems.

Chris received his bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Biomedical and Medical Engineering. He also wrote one of the most thoughtful perspectives on the entrepreneurial journey when he handed over the reigns to new CEO Justin Mortara last November. At 8,200 words, it may also be one of the longest.

Listen and learn…

1. What led Chris to care about solving sleep problems
2. How EnsoData overcame being "a solution in search of a problem"
3. How AI and machine learning can be applied to sleep apnea
4. How being incubated by Y Combinator helped launch EnsoData
5. How to use brainwaves to train AI models to diagnose sleep issues
6. When we'll get "smart rooms" that adjust the environment to optimize for healthy sleep
7. How Chris and the team control for the impact of AI bias
8. How to improve the quality of your sleep… from an expert
9. What led Chris to replace himself as CEO

References in this episode…

• Gordon Wilson, Rain Neuromorphics CEO, on AI and the Future of Work
• Why We Sleep by Matt Walker
• Stanford Professor Dr. William Dement and the origins of sleep science