Active intelligence for the sleeping mind.

The first closed-loop neuro-agent for cognitive recovery and memory consolidation.

One third of human life is spent asleep. Paprika turns passive rest into active cognitive recovery, pairing forehead EEG with ambient sound to compound your next-day performance.

A woman asleep in a bright bedroom, the wearable on her forehead.
01 · The Shift

Tracking tells you how you slept. Paprika changes how you sleep.

Sleep tracking stops at observation. Rings and watches give you a morning score, but do nothing to change your night. Paprika intervenes in real time to guide recovery while you sleep.

Paprika builds the first closed loop between brainwaves and sound. While the body sleeps, hearing stays receptive. The agent whispers to steer memory consolidation, and falls completely silent the instant deep sleep demands it.

  1. Passive trackingA morning score, not a change.
  2. Blind audioThe same static track for everyone.
  3. PaprikaReal-time closed-loop modulation.
Passive trackingRings and bands grade the night after it is over. Data without intervention.1 in 3of fitness tracker owners abandon their devices within six months. Endeavour Partners, 2014Morninga score for a night already gone
A woman asleep in white bedding under snowy mountains, wearing the Paprika wearable.
02 · The Architecture

A precision neuro-wearable. Ambient mobile audio. Zero screens.

Engineered for zero sleep friction. No bulky headphones and no glowing screens. A whisper-light forehead band reads your neural state; your phone’s speaker fills the room with adaptive acoustic soundscapes.

02 · The System · The Closed Loop

A closed-loop ecosystem for sleep.

Paprika never plays the same night twice. Five moves, one loop, running live while you sleep.

  1. A sleeper on dark water, labelled brain signal, sleep stage and live EEG.01Sense

    Precision EEG captures micro-arousals and stage shifts at 256 Hz.

  2. A bed in a forest clearing, with the prompt: what would you like to dream about tonight?02Compose

    Agent personalizes tonight's soundscape based on daytime cognitive load.

  3. A voice level softening from spoken to a whisper over a field of grass.03Incubate

    Whispers cognitive anchors at the exact alpha-to-theta shift of sleep onset.

  4. A voice level curve that drops the moment the sleeper stirs and comes back softer.04Protect

    Enforces total silence the instant slow-wave delta power emerges.

  5. Concentric rings of the agent loop with notes from nights seven and nine.05Consolidate

    Reinforces memory reactivation in REM; morning synthesis audits recall.

  6. A sleeper in morning light, with the note that none of 17 whispers in REM woke the sleeper.Quiet by default

    Speaks only when your brain is ready to listen.

  7. The agent weighing speak, wait or stay silent over a sleeping face.Thinks all night

    Every moment, it decides: speak, wait or stay silent.

  8. Habits, memories and dreams drawn as one connected map.Knows what matters

    Your habits, memories and dreams, connected.

  9. Three overlapping rings: sense, ritual, orchestrate, with the agent at the centre.One closed loop

    Senses, decides, acts: voice, sound or silence.

  10. Concentric rings: sleep data at the centre, phone only; nothing kept in the cloud.Private by design

    Yours, encrypted. Never sold, never used for ads.

02 · The System · The App

An interface that disappears in the dark.

High performance requires uninterrupted rest. Talk naturally before bed to clear cognitive residue. The phone stays face down all night. No blue light, no typing, zero friction.

A hand holding the phone in bed, the Paprika app on Tonight.
Every night. Every night it knows your sleep better, and the ritual fits closer.
The Night screen: stages from the sensor and every cue the agent spoke.
During sleep. Stages from the sensor, every cue it spoke, 30 s of EEG on tap.
The Morning screen: a plain-language recap of the night.
Morning. A curated voice recap: what it heard, what it did, what changes next.
A woman asleep in a dark bedroom, the wearable on her forehead lit by a bedside lamp.
02 · The System · The Sensor

256 samples per second. Zero guesswork.

Precision dry EEG electrodes positioned on the forehead, where prefrontal slow oscillations and cognitive consolidation signals are cleanest. Edge algorithms score sleep depth and calmness every few seconds.

Stage · telemetrysample demo · forehead · 256 Hz
Awake4:52Playhead
Drowsiness0–100 · the whole night
EEG · last 8 s, real speed±200 µV
–Delta0.5–4 Hz–Theta4–8 Hz–Alpha8–12 Hz–Low beta12–20 Hz–High beta20–30 Hz–Gamma30+ Hz
Mode
Listening
State
Awake
Voice
Silent
Theme
Blackthorn Avenue, one summer
Into the night
2 min
Drowsiness
–
Calmness
–
Everything follows the playhead: stage, drowsiness, calmness and band power are the wearable's own output for that half minute; mode and voice come from the agent's log. The trace is the raw signal recorded at the start of each moment, played at real speed.
03 · The Night · The Science

Agents for cognitive augmentation.

Paprika is a culmination of work across seven fields: targeted memory reactivation, dream incubation, lucid dream induction, closed-loop stimulation and sleep staging, sleep, emotion and memory, the ethics of reaching a sleeping mind, and art, design and HCI. Our own research continues at Harvard and the MIT Media Lab.

03 · Proof of Execution

How the agent navigates a human night.

This is not an illustrative render. Below is an uninterrupted 8-hour session recorded on our prototype. Inspect how real-time neural scoring drives autonomous acoustic decisions.

A woman asleep under an open sky, wearing the Paprika wearable.
01 / 06Beta to Alpha · 4:50Wind-downAwake, eyes closedConversational decompression: grounding cognitive fatigue, anchoring target themes, and pacing respiration as beta rhythms fade.SignalBeta calmingAgentDecompressionVoiceCadence slowing
A woman asleep on a sofa in afternoon light, her phone face down on the table.
04 · Data Sovereignty

Your neural data never leaves your nightstand.

Brainwaves are the most intimate biological signal humans generate. Paprika measures functional sleep states like sleep depth, drowsiness, and micro-arousals, never private thoughts. Your raw neural telemetry is processed on-device and encrypted, with zero biometric data exposed to third-party APIs.

  1. 01On-Device Neural Inference

    Raw EEG signals and sleep-staging algorithms run locally on phone silicon. Your brainwaves never leave your device.

  2. 02Decoupled Voice Layer

    Voice synthesis uses enterprise-encrypted, low-latency pipelines with zero biometric telemetry shared or retained.

  3. 03Functional, Not Semantic

    Paprika monitors physiological rest states to see how your brain is recovering, never what you are thinking.

  4. 04Instant Purge

    Your biometric archive belongs to you. Erase your night history and personalization profiles with a single tap.

Peiyan Zou and Ray Zhang in their studio, with two chairs they designed.
05 · Leadership

Leadership.

Peiyan ZouCo-Founder, CEO (right)Peiyan Zou is a hardware and product designer who works where engineering meets art. He graduated first of his BSc cohort at UCL’s Bartlett, with many prizes including the RIBA Donaldson Medal. As digital lead on Peter Cook Studio’s core team, he led computational design and digital twins for projects like the 2025 Serpentine Pavilion, and built its complete parametric AI design workflow. As LiDAR and AI researcher at Dutch firm Instance BV, he initiated a topic in the 2025 Venice Biennale project applying machine learning and remote sensing to self-driving LiDAR datasets to inform future urban design, and directed the VFX team behind its film. As co-founder and director of wedge.global, he built a recognised research design studio within a year, showing at all the major design weeks. He also led the team behind the world’s first mass-produced 3D-printed silica-sand furniture for a Swiss boutique hotel. Currently researching physical AI at Harvard and MIT Media Lab, he leads Paprika’s hardware systems and product development.
Ray ZhangCo-Founder, CTO (left)Ray Zhang is a full-stack engineer and designer who builds complex hardware and software systems end-to-end, spanning signal processing, agentic AI, and advanced manufacturing. At Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and AL_A, he engineered proprietary form-finding algorithms, robotic fabrication pipelines, and AI-native design workflows. As chief AI consultant at WSBS, he independently architected and shipped their core ontology and agentic system. As co-founder and Head of R&D at wedge.global, he invented the company’s core material-driven modeling method (featured in a keynote at Foster + Partners) and established its global production network. Trained at the Architectural Association and currently researching cognitive augmentation at Harvard and the MIT Media Lab, he leads Paprika’s agentic architectures and responsive environment systems.

Radical velocity. Uncompromising craft.

We are serial, full-stack builders recognized as Exceptional Talents by the UK Government. We met six years ago in design research and have executed together ever since, backed by advisors from Harvard, MIT Media Lab, and UCL. Ray launched his first business in primary school, selling sneakers to buy his first iPhone; Peiyan was running technical workshops and leading studio directions early in his career. Everywhere we land, we operate as disruptors because we execute at extreme speed without compromising on craft.

Because we both cross over seamlessly between physical engineering, agentic software, design, and commercial execution, we eliminate traditional handoff friction. Scaling wedge.global from incorporation to international distribution in under 12 months proved our ability to bring complex products to market fast. While we came to Harvard and MIT Media Lab to advance our research, we recognize that the academic world moves at a different speed than the real world. We refuse to be slowed down. Today we are engineering the future of personal sleep intelligence at the radical velocity it deserves.

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