Silicon Valley startup Sprayable has sold more than 40,000 bottles of its topical caffeine spray in dozens of countries since launching the product in August 2013. The goal is to make caffeine more agreeable to people who can’t stomach coffee or energy drinks. The recommended dose of four to six sprays contains less caffeine than a cup of coffee and provides a more even boost, says co-founder Ben Yu, a Harvard dropout who started pursuing the idea after participating in billionaire Peter Thiel’s fellowship for teenagers who skip college.
The six-person Sunnyvale (Calif.) business has a new product that uses the same transdermal technology for the opposite effect: helping people get to sleep. Yu, 22, and his co-founder, former venture capitalist Deven Soni, 35, kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo this week to sell at least $36,000 worth of orders, with plans to start shipping to customers this summer. A 5 milliliter bottle containing 30 squirts costs $15. It contains water, a derivative of the amino acid tyrosine, and the hormone melatonin, which the human body produces at night to regulate the sleep-wake cycle. Melatonin has long been available in pill form.
Sprayable’s innovation is making melatonin molecules more soluble in water by encapsulating them. Compared with swallowing melatonin and losing most of it to the digestive process, absorbing the hormone through the skin means “you can much better control the dose, and the amount is much closer to the body’s natural production level,” says Yu. He invented the sprays with help from his 58-year-old father, Chongxi Yu, who has a Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry from Rutgers University. The elder Yu has been modifying existing drugs, such as ibuprofen, to enable them to be delivered transdermally at his pharmaceutical company near Shanghai and testing the treatments in U.S. clinical trials.
To avoid regulatory hurdles, Sprayable is borrowing from its original playbook for caffeine. The new formula doesn’t require approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because the agency classifies it as an over-the-counter cosmetic, says Yu. Sprayable’s caffeine spray is also unregulated by the FDA. Both sprays are patent-pending, and the tyrosine derivative is produced at his father’s Chinese company, which limits the potential for copycats.
Melatonin is safe for short-term use, says M. Safwan Badr, chief of the division of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and a former president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Badr recently took melatonin to recover from jet lag. Still, he cautions that its long-term effects are unknown: “If you asked me, ‘Shall I use it?’ I would tell you to talk to your doctor first.” Yu notes his spray contains far less melatonin than pills. “You try to live your life as well as you can without these things, you try to limit artificial light and get enough sleep," he says. “But in those times where you can’t, or you travel and you have jet lag, it’s the perfect time to use something like this to really train your body to get back on schedule.”
The market for sleep aids was projected to reach $58.5 billion globally last year and $76.7 billion in 2019, according to a 2014 report by market researcher BCC Research. Natana Raj, the medical analyst who wrote the BCC report, cites separate research that pegs the current market for melatonin products at $586.5 million—and that could reach an estimated $1.3 billion in 2019.
In addition to its first crowdfunding campaign, which raised nearly $170,000, Sprayable has raised a little more than $500,000 from angel investors, including Martin Bispels, a former senior executive at home shopping network QVC. Bispels expects Sprayable to land its first distribution deals this year with convenience stores and other retailers.
Yu refrains from projecting this year’s sales, although he says feedback from many of the roughly 1,000 people who have tried the sleep spray makes him confident of its mass appeal. To keep expenses low, he and his wife, a Harvard computer science undergraduate, “hacked the living-cost situation in San Francisco” and are staying in an RV equipped with solar panels on the roof. They park near Sprayable's office in an industrial area of Sunnyvale.
The business could be seen as “less audacious than life extension or flying cars,” the kinds of technologies that Thiel’s fellowship intends to spur. But it is in keeping with its premise: Sprayable, Yu says, “does have a lot of groundbreaking potential, without needing $20 million in funding, for example, to get off the ground.”
