Sleeptracker Inventor Lee Loree

Lee Loree, 37, graduated in 1995 with an economics degree from the University of Virginia. After graduation, he moved from his hometown of Richmond to Atlanta, where he spent the next few years bouncing around selling insurance, working as a real estate analyst for a firm and then as branch analyst for MCI. He landed a stable position as a sell-side analyst for a regional banking division of CitiGroup in the private wealth division.

Lee had a unique idea one night after noticing his wife’s sleeping habits. What he saw was a change in how alert she was when awoken - based on how soundly she was sleeping at the time – and her recollection of being awoken at different times. Lee figured there was something to this and wondered if he could develop a product that could track sleep patterns and ultimately wake you from a light (and alert) sleep. Lee hired a sleep physician and engineer and developed a product that did just that.

Lee founded Atlanta-based Innovative Sleep Solutions in 2005 and developed SLEEPTRACKER (www.sleeptracker.com) - a watch that monitors your body while you sleep and continuously looks for your best possible waking times. The second generation of the watch – SLEEPTRACKER PRO - was launched in the fall of 2007, adding a PC and software component to track sleep data over time.

Lee’s business has taken off at warp speed and is showing no signs of slowing. More than 6,000 units of SLEEPTRACKER were sold in the first nine months of the product launch in 2005 and now more than 100,000 units have been sold to date worldwide. The product was honored as one of TIME magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year in 2005 and won a Design and Engineering Award at CES 2006.

SLEEPTRACKER has seen 50 percent year over year growth since the product’s introduction and was most recently named to the 2009 Inc. 5000 of Fastest Growing Companies.