True Beauty Ventures has invested in a new brand — and got in early.
The fund backing Sofie Pavitt Face, Crown Affair, Dieux and more has invested in sleep brand Sleep or Die, which launched in 2025, for the brand’s angel round, writing a check to the tune of $1 million.
The brand, founded by chief executive officer Lauren Sudeyko, came into being after stints at PepsiCo and Google. Her own sleep struggles led her to entrepreneurship.
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“I tried pharmaceutical sleep aids, natural sleep aids, teas, potions, sleep girl mocktails, everything. But I found frustration with all of them. Pills felt medicinal, gummies had sugar, and I started looking for a solution,” Sudeyko said. “I have such a traditional [marketing] background that it wasn’t until I started reading ‘The Artist’s Way’ that I allowed myself to try new things, push the envelope, challenge things creatively. That’s when the vision for Sleep or Die came to life.”
The brand debuted in 2025 with sleep tape, which was a strategic decision before she homed in on the tongue strip format à la Listerine. “I didn’t have enough money to do R&D for sleep strips, so I launched mouth tape. It was a high-margin, low-[minimum order quantity] product, so I thought I could get some money to put into the strips,” she said. “We were working on strips the whole time, but we launched mouth tape as our first product.”
The brand’s visual identity is one of its biggest differentiators. Sleep is “All lavender, navy blue. I just knew in my bones it was the right time to disrupt this industry. So, when both things came together, it was the perfect mix for me,” she said.
She’s taking a measured and personalized approach to building community, as the brand is still a party of one. “I’ve DM’d a few people on Instagram the last few days with millions of followers, and they’ve replied,” Sudeyko said. “People want to feel like they’re part of something, and people know when they’re being sold to.”
When Sudeyko first posted organically the product’s packaging on LinkedIn, it reached 200,000 people in four days. “The inbound was incredible in terms of people just being excited about it,” she said, including a handful of investors. “When it came to evaluating, I needed a VC that would bet on creativity. What really stood out to me about them is that they were on the waitlist and all bought product on launch day.”
That investment will go largely to scaling that community (which Sudeyko calls “The Strip Club”) as well as product development. “I’ve emailed every single person who bought strips from us. Thousands, which I do in batches. I get the chance to have one-to-one conversations with everyone, I get their feedback. They’re my bosses,” she said.
As for upcoming launches, “If a normal sleep brand would do it, we won’t. I don’t want to make a sleep mask that says ‘sleep tight’ on it,” she said. “Where I want to go deep is strip innovation, which there are a lot of need states around. If you’ve had a glass of wine, you could take a strip before bed. There’s an opportunity for libido, cold and sinus. From a 360-degree perspective, we want to own the bedside table, so we want to own that and become synonymous with it.”