Shimin
Ooi

Ask Shimin Ooi what she does and the answer doubles as an accusation: she runs a clinic for the thing you keep telling yourself you'll fix later. Sleep Reset is a virtual sleep clinic, and Ooi is its CEO. The product is unglamorous on purpose. No miracle gummy, no wearable that buzzes you awake at the optimal nanosecond. Instead there is a licensed clinical program built on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia - the CBT-I that sleep doctors quietly consider the gold standard for chronic insomnia - delivered through an app and a one-on-one coach.

Her pitch lands because it reframes a problem people think they understand. "What people often call burnout," she has argued, "might actually be an untreated sleep disorder." It is a tidy, unsettling idea: the exhaustion you have been blaming on your job, your inbox, your age, might be a clinical condition with a known treatment. Sleep Reset's bet is that the treatment shouldn't require a referral, a sleep lab, or a bottle of pills.

The company she leads was founded by Yunha Kim, the serial entrepreneur behind Simple Habit, and it carries the kind of backing that makes investors lean in - Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Stanford University among them, with a clinical program shaped by doctors out of Stanford and Yale. Ooi's job is to turn that science into something a tired person at 2 a.m. will actually use. That is harder than it sounds, and it is the part she seems built for.

Because Ooi did not arrive at sleep by way of sleep. She arrived by way of strategy. At McKinsey & Company in New York she was an Engagement Manager working healthcare systems and private equity - the consulting equivalent of learning how the machinery of medicine actually moves money and patients. Then she went operator, running Strategic Finance & Business Operations at Pilot, the startup that handles bookkeeping for other startups. Then she went investor, as a Partner at Index Ventures, sitting on the other side of the table deciding which founders to believe.

Strategy, operations, capital. It is an unusually complete tour of the startup ecosystem, and it explains a lot about how she runs a company. She has seen how businesses are diagnosed, how they are built, and how they are funded. Sleep Reset is where she gets to do all three at once, in a category most people would rather sleep through than scrutinize.

The thesis was there long before the title. Her quote on the matter has the ring of something she has said many times because she means it: "Sleep is such an underrated problem. We spend on average a third of our lives sleeping but many people don't give good quality sleep the importance it deserves." A third of a life is not a rounding error. It is the single largest activity most humans will ever do, and we have collectively decided it is the thing to cut first.

In 2025 that argument got a stage. Ooi took Sleep Reset to the AARP AgeTech Collaborative pitch competition at HLTH, one of the loudest gatherings in health innovation, and won the AgeTech After Dark prize. A sleep company winning a contest literally named "After Dark" is the sort of detail that writes itself - and a useful reminder that aging well and sleeping well are the same problem wearing two different name tags.

What makes her a compelling person to bet on is not a single credential. It is the through-line. She is the rare leader who can read a clinical study, model the unit economics, and still remember that the customer is a human being who is genuinely, miserably tired. That combination - rigor plus empathy, the spreadsheet plus the bedside - is exactly what a category like sleep has been missing.