Wesley Lones’s company Daybreak tackles sleep apnea entirely from home, replacing the CPAP mask with a custom-fit oral appliance.

Here’s a statistic that might keep you up at night: As many as 83 million U.S. adults suffer from obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that causes them to stop breathing over and over again while they sleep, waking up dozens or even hundreds of times a night.

The standard treatment is a CPAP machine, a clunky device that keeps the airway open by delivering pressurized air through a mask. It works. But millions of people with sleep apnea remain untreated.

“I spent two years looking over my shoulder thinking, how could the most advanced wealthy country in the history of the world have millions of people suffering from an ailment and not have a treatment,” Lones says. “I must be missing something.”

What Lones eventually realized was that the problem wasn’t the lack of an effective treatment. It was the treatment itself. Many patients simply hate sleeping with a mask strapped to their face while pressurized air blows into their nose or mouth.

He wasn’t looking to start a new business. After helping build Byte, which was acquired for $1.04 billion, Lones was in the fortunate position of not having to work. He planned to take a few years off. “That lasted about seven minutes,” he says.

The more he studied the problem of sleep apnea, the harder it became to ignore the opportunity. Lones founded Daybreak , a fully remote platform that takes patients from diagnosis through treatment at home and offers a custom-fit oral appliance as an alternative to CPAP.

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