After building a platform that supported thousands of mothers with their wellbeing, Sally Wood kept hearing the same problem.
Bedtime.
"No matter what else was going on, it kept coming up," she said. "Parents were exhausted. Kids were struggling to fall asleep. It was creating stress for the whole family."
The problem wasn't small. According to data from the Royal Children's Hospital, one in four Australian children have difficulty getting to sleep. For many families, bedtime becomes a nightly battle that drags on for hours, creating friction that spills into the rest of family life.
For Sally, it wasn't just something she was hearing from her community. It was happening at home too. She watched her own kids with busy brains that left them tired but wired at the end of the day, and went looking for something that actually helped.
"Most of the tools out there rely on content that demands a child's attention," she explained. "But no amount of content can talk an activated mind into rest. When I spoke to children and families, it became clear this wasn't really a sleep problem. It was a nervous system problem."
That insight became the foundation for Kinrest, a startup building what Sally describes as the off switch for an always-on world.
Rather than another app or content platform, Kinrest is developing a screen-free companion designed to help children settle into rest more easily. The first product, currently known as the Kinling, combines evidence-informed sensory principles into a single, coherent experience. Organic in shape and designed to be held close or rested against the body, it incorporates gentle pressure, warmth and a slow, heartbeat-like rhythm to guide the breath. Over time, it's designed to learn what works for each child and adapt to them.
"It's a body-first approach," Sally said. "The goal is to help children feel physically safe enough to rest."
The idea gained momentum when Sally joined Startmate's Launch Club earlier this year. Entering with a strong hunch but many unanswered questions, she used the program to pressure-test her assumptions through customer conversations and early experiments. Rather than waiting to build technology, she ran Wizard-of-Oz style tests with families in her own network, exploring how different sensory experiences influenced the transition to sleep.
The results reinforced what she suspected. Parents weren't looking for more stimulation. They were looking for something that genuinely helped their child drift off, while building the underlying skill of self-regulation over time.
Her advice to other founders follows from that experience. "Speak to people living the problem. Build from first principles. Just because you've had an experience doesn't mean your assumptions are right. The insights you uncover can completely change your direction."
Sally is now bringing together the expertise needed to build Kinrest's first prototype, spanning engineering, product design and technical development. Clinical validation is also a priority, with plans to work alongside researchers and clinicians to understand how a body-first approach can support children's sleep and rest. And her vision extends well beyond bedtime. She sees Kinrest as the beginning of an entirely new category of rest technology, one built to grow with the people who use it. The child who learns to regulate at ten becomes the stressed teenager, and the overwhelmed adult, still reaching for the same thing.
It's a personal mission as much as a commercial one. Having spent her career scaling businesses inside the attention economy, Sally is now doing the opposite.
"We're surrounded by technology designed to capture our attention," she said. "I want to create the kind that helps people let it go."
"Imagine every home having something they know they can reach for when a child is struggling to settle," she said. "That's what I'm building towards."
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