Medical devices & diagnostics · Pediatric sleep
Lully
An under-the-mattress vibration pod that promised to head off children's night terrors before they started. It sold for about a decade, never published its Stanford study, and is now inactive: production stopped by 2021 and the company website is offline.
A hockey puck under the mattress
Slide it between the mattress and the box spring, plug it in, and answer a few questions in a phone app about when your child usually screams. That was the pitch behind the Lully Sleep Guardian, a Bluetooth-enabled pod about the size of a hockey puck. An algorithm used the parent's answers to guess the moment a night terror was about to start, then told the parent to walk over and switch the device on. For up to five minutes it buzzed under the mattress, hard enough to nudge the child without fully waking them.
Carol Lin, a Mountain View mother and former child psychologist, tried it on her daughter Madelyn after months of nightly episodes. "It was not intrusive, so I didn't think it was a big deal if it didn't work," she told CBS News in 2016. She said the night terrors stopped within four months of regular use.
The problem
Night terrors are not nightmares. A child in the middle of one may sit up, scream, thrash or talk, eyes open, heart racing, and remember none of it in the morning. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine put the rate at roughly 6.5 percent of children, and pediatricians have long told families to simply wait it out, since most kids grow out of it and the condition leaves no lasting medical harm. That advice is medically sound and clinically unsatisfying: waiting can take years, and parents are the ones losing sleep in the meantime.
The one behavioral fix with any evidence behind it, called scheduled awakening, has parents physically rouse their child a few minutes before a terror usually strikes. Dr. Judith Owens, a pediatric sleep specialist, told NPR in 2015 that the technique "work about 50 percent of the time," and that most parents simply do not want to wake a sleeping child on a schedule. Lully's idea was to automate the awakening and make it gentler, a partial nudge instead of a full rousing.
Founders
Varun Boriah and Dr. Andy Rink met as fellows in the Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellowship, Boriah in the 2013 to 2014 class and Rink a year ahead of him. Rink, trained in general surgery, had grown up watching his twin sister suffer through night terrors and, later, her own children go through the same thing. "My twin sister suffered from night terrors throughout her childhood, and now her children do as well, so I have seen firsthand how scary and disruptive pediatric sleep disorders can be for entire families," he told CBS News in 2016.
Boriah, an engineer who had previously been CEO of a blood-diagnostics company, framed the problem in blunter terms to CNBC in 2016: "It's like a terrible temper tantrum, but your child's asleep through the entire episode. And up until now, there has been no solution." The pair co-founded Lully out of the fellowship in 2014, ran a small pilot at the Stanford Sleep Center, and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch.
From YC batch to storefront, and back down
Lully went through the usual startup beats. TechCrunch covered the YC launch in March 2015 and put seed funding at $920,000. By that summer, NPR reported the company had "just wrapped up its Y Combinator seed funding after raising $2.1 million." A second hardware version, the Sleep Guardian Plus, arrived in February 2016, and CNBC that March put cumulative funding at $2.2 million since 2014, backed by Y Combinator, Stanford-StartX Fund, Two Sigma Ventures and the hardware accelerator Highway1. CNBC also reported more than 1,200 units sold by that point, though Lully would not disclose revenue.
The device kept selling through a Sleep Guardian 2 version for years, reviewed as late as 2023 on the parenting site Lucie's List. But the review site SleepGadgets.io added a note to its Lully page in March 2021: "Lully Sleep Guardian is no longer in production." As of September 2026 the company's own site, lullysleep.com, returns a server error. Both founders have since moved into other healthcare roles unconnected to Lully: Boriah leads sales at Luminai after stops at Truepill and Alto Pharmacy, and Rink is a partner at Healthcare Foundry after leading Truepill's telehealth business, per their current Y Combinator founder bios. Neither bio lists Lully as active. A separate app called "Lully: Meditation & Sleep," in the App Store, is published by an unrelated developer, Weave Apps LTD, and is not connected to this company.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA status | No 510(k) or PMA record found for Lully or the Sleep Guardian. Co-founder Varun Boriah told CNBC in 2016 that "the device is not treating what the FDA would consider a medical condition, and therefore the agency does not recognize it as a medical device or a regulated product." | Public record |
| Stanford study, sample size | CBS News and NPR both described a 150-subject clinical study run with Stanford University School of Medicine researchers in 2014. CNBC, reporting on the same underlying research, quoted Boriah citing "10,000 nights of testing with 15 test subjects." | Conflicting accounts |
| Study publication | CBS News reported in 2016 that "the research has yet to be published." No matching paper turns up in a PubMed search for Lully, the Sleep Guardian or the founders as of September 2026. | Not found |
| Reported results | Figures vary by outlet and year: an "80 percent" reduction in night terrors (CBS, Business Insider), a "90-percent reduction in night terrors per week for kids with severe cases" (NPR), and the device stopping "8 out of 10 night terrors" (CNBC, SleepGadgets). | Company-stated |
| Patents | Boriah told CNBC in 2016 the company had "filed for U.S. and international patents" and held its core algorithm as a trade secret. No granted patent has been independently verified for this profile. | Company-stated |
| Units sold | More than 1,200 units sold as of March 2016, per the company; revenue and profitability were not disclosed. | Company-stated |
| Federal grants, trials | No NIH or NSF awards and no registered ClinicalTrials.gov record found for the company. | Public record |
Read plainly: Lully built and sold a real device for years, with enough satisfied customers to generate reviews into the 2020s. But its central claim, that a timed vibration can prevent a documented sleep disorder, rests on a small, unpublished pilot whose own reported sample size does not agree from one interview to the next. The company did not seek FDA oversight, a legal option for a consumer wellness tool, but that also leaves the "clinically-proven" language on its own site unverifiable against an outside record.
What to watch
- Whether the underlying Stanford pilot data is ever published, which would resolve the 150-subject versus 15-subject discrepancy.
- Whether lullysleep.com comes back online or the domain lapses; as of September 2026 it returns a server error.
- Whether either founder, both now in other healthcare roles, revives the product or the underlying algorithm elsewhere.
In their words
“My twin sister suffered from night terrors throughout her childhood, and now her children do as well, so I have seen firsthand how scary and disruptive pediatric sleep disorders can be for entire families.”
Dr. Andy Rink, co-founder, CBS News, 2016 · Independent
“Every night at a similar time, my sister would start screaming, crying and looking like what would be the most severe nightmare you've seen.”
Dr. Andy Rink, NPR, 2015 · Independent
“It's like a terrible temper tantrum, but your child's asleep through the entire episode. And up until now, there has been no solution.”
Varun Boriah, co-founder, CNBC, 2016 · Independent
“The device is not treating what the FDA would consider a medical condition, and therefore the agency does not recognize it as a medical device or a regulated product.”
Varun Boriah, CNBC, 2016 · Independent
“Scheduled awakenings work about 50 percent of the time.”
Dr. Judith Owens, pediatric sleep specialist, NPR, 2015 · Independent
“We were surprised by the number of people we talked to who either had direct experience with night terrors or knew someone affected by them, but had never thought about the condition as a problem that could be solved.”
Varun Boriah, Stanford Biodesign interview · Independent
“It was not intrusive, so I didn't think it was a big deal if it didn't work.”
Carol Lin, parent user, CBS News, 2016 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- CompanyLully company page
- CompanyLully (YC W15) Built A Device To Prevent Night Terrors
- IndependentVarun Boriah and Andy Rink profile
- IndependentLully Reducing Night Terrors: An Interview with Varun Boriah of Lully
- IndependentYC-Backed Lully Built A Device To Prevent Night Terrors
- IndependentSleep Like A Baby (Minus The Night Terrors) With Good Vibrations
- IndependentS.F. startup Lully aims to help parents calm kids' night terrors
- IndependentStart-up makes sleep device to combat night terror
- IndependentCould this device cure your child's night terrors?
- IndependentThis device can help prevent the worst kinds of nightmares
- IndependentLully For Night Terrors
- IndependentLully Sleep Guardian 2, updated with discontinuation note
- Public recordLully company profile records (FDA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH, NSF, PubMed queries)
- Companylullysleep.com, current site status
- CompanySleep Guardian 2 product page
- IndependentLully: Meditation & Sleep app listing, unrelated developer
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
