Digital health · Insomnia care
Sleep Reset
An app that delivers the behavioral treatment for insomnia through a human coach who texts, for a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand. The therapy it borrows is first line care. The program itself rests on one uncontrolled study and carries no FDA clearance.
The waitlist that became a company
In 2020 Yunha Kim was running a meditation app from home, twelve to fourteen hours a day, with no boundary left between the desk and the bed. Her own sleep collapsed. “It was so bad that at one point, I was on sleeping pills,” she wrote afterward in Business Insider. She woke groggy, drank too much coffee, and lost the following night to the caffeine.
So she tried to book a top tier sleep clinic. The waitlist ran past six months.
That waitlist is the company. Sleep Reset sells the appointment she could not get.
A treatment almost nobody can reach
Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is not a wellness fashion. In May 2016 the American College of Physicians made it the first line treatment for adults with chronic insomnia, ahead of drugs. In April 2026 the American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a guideline on combining the therapy with medication and came down, again, on the therapy alone.
The gap is delivery. Chronic insomnia occurs in roughly 10 to 15 percent of adults, per that guideline, and the supply of clinicians trained to run a structured course is a rounding error against that. What fills the gap is a waitlist, then a prescription pad.
Two companies tried to close it through the FDA. Pear Therapeutics took Somryst through a traditional 510(k), cleared March 23, 2020, supported by two randomized trials in more than 1,400 adults. Big Health followed with Sleepio, marketed as SleepioRx, cleared August 5, 2024. The regulated road proved expensive: Pear went bankrupt in 2023 and Somryst sold at auction for $3.9 million.
Sleep Reset went the other way. No prescription, no clearance, sold straight to the person lying awake at 3 a.m.
From meditation to sleep
Kim dropped out of Stanford’s business school to build Simple Habit, a five minute meditation app, in 2016. She pitched it on Shark Tank in 2017, asked $600,000 for 5 percent, was called a gold digger on camera by Mark Cuban, and walked away from a joint offer. “I turned it down because the offer was not a good deal for my company,” she told Forbes years later. Private money came anyway: a $2.5 million seed reported in November 2017 alongside New Enterprise Associates, FJ Labs, Foundation Capital and the founders of Dropbox and Gusto, then a $10 million Series A led by Foundation Capital a year after that.
By 2020 Simple Habit had passed 5 million users, and one answer kept coming back. Sleep. About a tenth of the library was sleep content and it drew roughly 70 percent of the engagement. Kim built Sleep Reset with academic sleep researchers and launched it in 2022. In March 2023 she sold the Simple Habit app to Ingenio, an online marketplace whose older properties include a psychic readings business, and renamed the company Sleep Reset, Inc.
What a member actually does
A member takes an online quiz, pays, and is handed a coach who messages inside the app. The engine is sleep compression: time in bed is cut back to match the hours actually slept, which is punishing before it helps. The reviewer Verywell Mind sent through in 2023 paid $297 for eight weeks and was handed a 1:10 a.m. bedtime. Her coach talked her through the worst of it. By 2026 the company sells more: a home sleep apnea test read by board certified physicians, oral appliance therapy, and telehealth visits.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Peer reviewed study | Frontiers in Sleep, 2023. 564 people who finished the program, self reported diaries, no control group, no intent to treat analysis. Mean total sleep time rose about 44 minutes; among those at 6 hours or less at baseline, 85.1 minutes. | Peer reviewed |
| Who it enrolled | Applicants with a diagnosed sleep disorder, including insomnia and sleep apnea, were screened out and referred elsewhere, as were people with bipolar disorder, seizure disorder or any risk of self harm. The authors call it a non clinical coaching program and frame the result as a resource for subclinical populations. | Peer reviewed |
| Who ran it | Simple Habit staff supplied the data. Senior author Michael Grandner discloses consulting fees from Sleep Reset; first author Suzanne Gorovoy discloses unpaid consulting. | Peer reviewed |
| FDA status | No 510(k) or PMA under either company name. A company page states that the program “may not be suited for individuals with certain medical, neurological, and psychiatric conditions or those with medically diagnosed sleep disorders.” | Public record |
| The marketing claim | The App Store listing calls it “The #1 clinically proven insomnia program.” and the only digital sleep program clinically proven to treat insomnia using CBT-I. The one peer reviewed study excluded people with diagnosed insomnia and had no control group. | Differs from the record |
| Size of the effect | The home page reports 85 minutes more sleep with an asterisk limiting it to members at 6 hours or less at baseline, and elsewhere claims 1.5 hours. The App Store offers “85 more minutes of sleep per night” with no qualifier. The published figure for all 564 completers is about 44 minutes. | Differs from the record |
| Who the coaches are | No established credential for sleep coaching exists, per the paper, so the company wrote its own training protocol, with on call access to a licensed clinical psychologist. The company says coaches hold degrees plus coaching certifications, many as National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coaches. Coaches are not licensed clinicians; the separate clinician roster is. | Company-stated |
| 2026 outcomes report | Company analysis of 2,745 members, intake surveys plus in app diaries. Headline: 72 percent no longer meeting insomnia diagnostic criteria at week 8. The report says of itself, “This report does not constitute a clinical trial; there is no control group.” Weekly samples fall from about 2,208 to about 720 by week 6. | Company-stated |
| Nothing else found | No registered study on ClinicalTrials.gov, no NIH or NSF award, and no second indexed paper. A cited 71.1 percent reduction in sleep aid use rests on a conference abstract. | Not found |
Read plainly: the therapy is proven and this delivery of it is not. The claims about cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia are carried by decades of trials run on the therapy, not on this app. What has been tested here is one uncontrolled study in people screened to exclude diagnosed insomnia, plus a company report that says in its own methodology that it is not a trial. The gains may be real. They have never been measured against a control group, and the product is sold hardest to the population that study left out.
What to watch
- A controlled trial. The 2023 authors named the missing control group themselves. Nothing has been registered since.
- Any FDA submission. Selling a home sleep apnea test and oral appliance therapy sits nearer regulated diagnosis than text coaching did.
- Whether the App Store copy and the peer reviewed record converge.
- A new SEC filing. The last one was November 2018, under the old name.
In their words
“It was so bad that at one point, I was on sleeping pills.”
Yunha Kim, founder and CEO, Business Insider, 2022 · Independent
“It was a difficult decision to pivot our resources to focus on Sleep Reset, especially because Simple Habit was doing very well.”
Yunha Kim, Forbes, 2023 · Interview
“In the nine months since we came out of beta, we’ve more than doubled our subscriber base and our revenue.”
Yunha Kim, TechCrunch, 2023 · Company-stated
“In fact, no other program to my knowledge has demonstrated effects of such magnitude.”
Michael Grandner, University of Arizona, company release quoted by Sleep Review, 2023 · Company release
“Since there is no established credential for sleep coaching, a standard training protocol was developed for this program”
Gorovoy, Campbell, Fox and Grandner, Frontiers in Sleep, 2023 · Peer reviewed
“The main limitation of this study is a lack of a control group.”
Gorovoy, Campbell, Fox and Grandner, Frontiers in Sleep, 2023 · Peer reviewed
“Our analysis suggests that CBT-I by itself is the most efficacious first-line treatment for insomnia.”
Daniel J. Buysse, lead author, AASM guideline, 2026 · Guideline
“The first few days of my compressed sleep schedule were miserable and filled with brain fog, exhaustion, and irritability.”
Elizabeth Michaelson Monaghan, Verywell Mind, 2023 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Simple Habit, Inc., CIK 0001758788
- Public recordFDA 510(k) K191716 (Somryst) and K233577 (Sleepio)
- Public recordFDA, PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH and NSF searches, nothing under either company name
- Peer reviewedApp-Supported Sleep Coaching: Implications for Sleep Duration and Sleep Quality
- GuidelineNew guideline provides recommendations on combining treatments for chronic insomnia
- GuidelineACP Recommends Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as Initial Treatment for Chronic Insomnia
- IndependentFDA clears SleepioRx for chronic insomnia
- IndependentNox Buys Pear’s Insomnia App for Nearly $4 Million at Auction
- IndependentMeditation app Simple Habit sells to Ingenio, pivots the company to Sleep Reset
- InterviewMeet The Tech CEO Going Deep On Sleep
- IndependentDigital Sleep Program Increases Sleep by Over One Hour
- IndependentI Tried the Sleep Reset App, hands on review
- IndependentThe morning routine I used to get off of sleeping pills
- IndependentSimple Habit raises $10 million Series A; earlier $2.5 million seed
- IndependentWhat Happened To The Simple Habit Meditation App From Shark Tank
- CompanyOutcomes Report 2026, care team page, home page and blog posts
- CompanySleep Reset: CBT for Insomnia, App Store listing
- CompanySleep Reset company profile
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
