Long before DUSQ existed, Dr. Siddhant Bhargava was already in the business of helping people feel better. A medical doctor by training, he had bootstrapped a national nutrition brand, FoodDarzee, to profitability, and along the way built an audience of close to a million people who followed him for health advice. Through that community, he kept hearing the same story over and over. People were trying pills, supplements and meditation apps to fix their sleep and stress, and none of them were reaching the root of the problem: the nervous system itself.

Looking at the market, Siddhant saw a gap that frustrated him. Sleep tech had spent a decade telling people what happened the night before, without changing how anyone actually slept. So in 2023, he set out to build something different, together with Shalmali Kadu, a second-time hardware founder with patents in product design and manufacturing, and Mitansh Khurana. Their hypothesis was simple but stubborn. Rather than compete in the tracker category occupied by Oura, Whoop and Garmin, they would build the world’s first closed-loop sleep regulation system.

The result is DUSQ: a 12-gram, behind-the-ear device that reads the autonomic nervous system in real time and delivers adaptive nerve stimulation the moment sleep is disrupted, guiding the body back into deeper sleep before the sleeper even notices something went wrong. The wearable gently stimulates the vagus nerve through the ear, the body’s own brake pedal, and pairs it with custom binaural beats to switch on the rest response.

Their lead investor saw the shift immediately. “The first wave of sleep tech gave people more data to look at without changing how anyone slept. The next wave will be defined by real intervention instead of more insight. DUSQ is building to lead that shift.” - Fireside Ventures

A category built from scratch in India

This is no wellness gadget, and the team made sure the science could back that up. Everything was built in-house, out of DUSQ’s own sleep lab, which has collected more than 50 million physiological data points. DUSQ is a registered medical device in India, holding CDSCO certification, and deploys an FDA-cleared stimulation modality for insomnia. The company has completed one clinical trial, with more than 460 participants, and a second is underway. In trials and among alpha users, stress fell by 36%, anxiety by 32%, and sleep improved by 25%. Double-blind results showed 31% more deep sleep, a 38% improvement in heart rate variability, and 22% fewer night awakenings. “We did not enter a category. We built one. From India,” says Siddhant, now co-founder and CEO.

The market soon agreed. The first devices made their way into homes across India, and DUSQ landed a three-Shark deal on Shark Tank India. With more than 2,000 first-generation users domestically behind them, the team launched on Kickstarter in the US on June 9, 2026, and crossed $1 million in pledges within days. In doing so, DUSQ made history as the fastest Indian health-tech company to reach that mark, surpassing every previous Indian healthtech company on the platform, including Ultrahuman’s original Ring campaign. After Antler, Fireside led the seed round: roughly $3 million, led by Fireside Ventures with participation from Antler India and Climber Capital, backing the next phase.

From no US pipeline to 150 early adopters

Kickstarter proved there was demand in the US, but turning that into a real business was another matter. Before Embark, DUSQ had no real US pipeline, and the Kickstarter traction was fresh and largely untested beyond initial demand. Since then, the company has shortlisted 150 early US adopters as it builds toward a broader retail launch, though that traction is still marked as “soon” rather than fully landed, and no additional funding has come through yet.

For Siddhant, the experience was transformative. “I’m a doctor by training. My previous startup wasn’t venture-backed, so my level of connections in this world was practically zero. Being here has probably been the best thing I’ve done all year. Embark started off as just an idea to us, that we’d come, explore, see what happens. But the thing that helped me most was actually changing my mindset. A lot of the fundamentals I believed about the US market shifted in just two weeks. And practically, we met around 50 people in that time, which is basically unheard of. The team made all of that happen so seamlessly.”

What comes next

With a Kickstarter record behind it, a US retail launch planned for September, and 150 early adopters already lined up, DUSQ is betting that a science-first, India-built device can hold its own in one of the most saturated consumer health markets in the world. Its ambition goes well beyond one market: a drug-free path to calm for the billion people living with stress and anxiety. Built in India, for a sleepless world.

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