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OptiBreath
Waitlist open · Founding units ship Q1 2027

You cannot feel the air getting worse. This instrument can.

OptiBreath is a desk instrument. It measures the carbon dioxide, particulates and VOCs in whatever room you happen to be working in, and it tells you in plain words when that room has started to cost you something. By about eleven in the morning a small office with the door shut is somewhere north of 1,200 ppm. Humans have no receptor for it at these concentrations, so nothing about the room feels any different.

  • No payment and no card details. An email address, and nothing else
  • One email, when there is finally something to buy
  • Founding Edition serial and Signal for life, at the standard price
  • Leave the list in one click, from any email we send
Read the evidence, including what argues against us

Nothing is for sale today. We will email you once, when there is.

Live simulation · one occupied room, 09:00 → 11:30

Start here

Which of these rooms are you in?

Indoor CO₂ behaves the same way whether the door belongs to an office, a bedroom or a meeting room. What changes is how much you care, and which of these you recognise.

  • A small room, door shut

    Home office, spare bedroom, any room you close to concentrate

    One person in a closed 12 m² office at half an air change per hour crosses 1,000 ppm in about seventy-five minutes, then levels off near 1,700 and stays there.

    What that does to your afternoon

  • A bedroom, overnight

    You wake up muzzy and blame the mattress

    A sealed bedroom typically reaches 2,000 to 2,500 ppm by morning, which is higher than the office everybody worries about. It is also the cheapest thing on this list to fix.

    CO₂ and sleep

  • On call, at 03:00

    You have an SLO on every service and none on the room

    The instrument exposes a local REST and MQTT API and a Prometheus endpoint, so the room goes on the same dashboard as everything else you watch.

    For SREs and on-call engineers

  • A meeting room, four people, an hour

    The decisions that are hard to take back

    Twenty minutes in, a four-person meeting room with the door shut is past 1,000 ppm. Initiative and strategy were the two measures that fell furthest in the chamber studies.

    Work out your own room

Joining costs an email address. No payment, no card details, not even a name. We write to you once, when there is finally something to buy, and you make up your mind then.

The variable nobody is watching

Every room you think in has a number. You have never seen yours.

Outdoor air sits at roughly 425 ppm of CO₂, and everything above that figure in an occupied room is the people in it. Drag the slider to see what the published exposure conditions say about each concentration, from a ventilated room through to a sealed one. At 1,000 ppm, the first threshold most guidance names, six of nine measures of complex decision-making fell in one controlled study, with initiative and strategy taking the worst of it.

1,240ppm
  • Optimal
  • Elevated
  • Degraded
  • Impaired
  • Critical
400 · OUTDOORS1,000 · THRESHOLD3,000 · SEALED ROOM
Degraded· A meeting room with the door shut and four people in it.

At 1,000 ppm, six of nine decision-making measures fell moderately or substantially versus 600 ppm. Initiative and basic strategy were the most affected.

Indicative decision-making index

73/ 100

Roughly 27% below the performance measured at an outdoor-air baseline of 600 ppm.

Interpolated from the exposure conditions in Satish et al. (2012). A directional guide rather than a clinical measurement. We set out the limitations in full on the science page.

See the studies, including the ones that disagreeWork out your own room

The counter-evidence is published alongside, because a claim you have no way of checking is not much of a claim.

How it works

Measure, classify, intervene.

Plenty of monitors do the first two. The third is the one that changes what you do on a Tuesday afternoon, and it is where most of the engineering went.

  1. 01

    It measures what you cannot feel

    Human beings have no receptor for carbon dioxide at indoor concentrations. You will register that a room has got warm, or stuffy, or that you have stopped enjoying the meeting, long before you register that it went past 1,400 ppm. A dual-channel NDIR cell samples every second and holds ±(30 ppm + 3%) across the range.

  2. 02

    It tells you which band you are in

    A four-digit ppm figure is only useful if you already know what the digits mean. The display resolves the whole suite into one of six bands taken from the published exposure conditions, Baseline through Critical, so that a glance across the room is enough.

  3. 03

    It tells you when to act, and when not to

    The instrument learns your particular room: its volume, its air changes per hour, how quickly it recovers once a window is open. From that it works out the shortest intervention that will get you back to Optimal, and then it says nothing at all until the next time it has something useful to add.

Why you can believe any of this

The specification

±30 ppm
CO₂ accuracy
plus 3% of reading, across 400 – 10,000 ppm
6
sensing channels
nine on Pro, all sampled every second
1 min
logging resolution
held on-device for two years
0
moving parts
convective airflow — silent by construction

What is not in dispute

  • Indoor CO₂ is a reliable, real-time indicator of ventilation rate per occupant. That much is uncontested.
  • Low ventilation rates are independently associated with worse reported symptoms, higher absence and reduced performance.
  • Concentrations above 1,000 ppm indicate ventilation below the rate most standards target for occupied spaces.
  • You cannot perceive CO₂ at these concentrations. Without an instrument you have no idea which band you are in.

The suite

CO₂ is the headline number, and the least of it

Carbon dioxide tells you how much outside air a room is getting. It tells you nothing about what was already in the air before the window shut: the printer, the new carpet, the road outside.

  • CO₂

    Carbon dioxide

    The headline number, and the one with the most direct published link to decision-making performance. It tracks ventilation per occupant in real time, which is really what you are watching.

  • PM1 / PM2.5 / PM10

    Particulate matter

    Fine particulate carries the strongest long-term health evidence of anything in this suite. Indoor spikes from cooking, laser printers and traffic pulled in through a window are entirely invisible without an optical counter.

  • tVOC

    Volatile organic compounds

    Off-gassing from furniture, markers, cleaning products and warm electronics accumulates in precisely the sealed rooms where CO₂ is climbing anyway. Reported alongside each other, the two readings tell you whether a room is merely stale or actually contaminated.

  • T / RH

    Temperature & humidity

    Thermal comfort has one of the better-established links to office task performance. Relative humidity matters for viral survival, and also for the more mundane question of why your eyes feel like sandpaper by four in the afternoon.

  • hPa

    Barometric pressure

    Nobody buys an instrument for the barometer. It is here so the NDIR reading stays accurate at altitude and through weather swings, without you having to think about it.

  • lux

    Ambient light

    It drives the display's automatic brightness, and it feeds the circadian view in the app. Light exposure timing is one of the few environmental levers with a stronger evidence base behind it than CO₂ has.

  • HCHO

    Formaldehyde

    Pro

    The one VOC worth measuring specifically rather than folding into an index. New furniture, engineered flooring and recent renovation are the usual culprits, and they outgas for months rather than days.

  • NO₂

    Nitrogen dioxide

    Pro

    The marker for combustion getting in: gas hobs, an attached garage, or street-level traffic arriving through an open window or a badly sited air intake.

  • Rn

    Radon

    Pro

    A long-integration measurement rather than a live one, and the only figure in this suite that is a leading cause of lung cancer. Ground floor or basement, you want it. Third floor, you almost certainly do not.

Sensing principle, range, accuracy and resolution for every channel are on the instrument page.

Pricing at launch

Nothing is for sale today. This is what it will cost when it is.

Buy the hardware once. Everything the device does on your desk it goes on doing forever, with or without a subscription and with or without us. The figures are here now so that nobody joins the waitlist carrying a wrong impression of what it will eventually cost.

Most wanted

OptiBreath Core

For one person and one desk.

€390

One-time. VAT included. Ships free within the EU, UK and US.

The instrument, complete.

  • Six-sensor suite: CO₂, PM1/2.5/10, tVOC, temperature, humidity, pressure, ambient light
  • 2.4-inch transflective display, legible in direct sun and invisible in a dark room
  • Machined 6061 aluminium chassis, bead-blasted and anodised
  • Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE, USB-C Power Delivery, 8-hour internal battery
  • Full local operation, with no account required for the device to work
Join the waitlist

Q1 2027

OptiBreath Pro

For when the number has to hold up in front of somebody else.

€690

One-time. VAT included. Includes calibration certificate.

Referenced, certified, addressable.

Everything in Core, plus:

  • Formaldehyde, nitrogen dioxide and radon added to the suite
  • Per-unit factory calibration against a traceable reference, certificate included
  • Annual recalibration service at cost, with a loaner unit while yours is away
  • Wired Ethernet and PoE through the desk dock
  • Raw sensor stream export: no cloud round trip, no proprietary format
Join the waitlist

Q1 2027

OptiBreath Fleet

For a floor, a building, or several of both.

From€4,900

10-node starter deployment. Volume and per-desk pricing on request.

The whole floor, instrumented.

Everything in Pro, across every zone, plus:

  • Self-forming mesh of Pro nodes with a rack or wall-mount gateway
  • Zone dashboard with per-room alerting and escalation rules
  • BACnet/IP and Modbus TCP integration, to close the loop with your BMS
  • Quarterly Cognitive Environment Report, benchmarked against anonymised peers
  • SSO, SCIM provisioning, audit log, DPA and EU data residency
Request a pilot

Deployment slots from Q1 2027

Full comparisonJoin the waitlist, free

Nothing is charged today, and joining takes an email address and nothing else. 60-day return once units ship, 3-year warranty on Core and 5 on Pro.

The waitlist is open to everyone. The first 500 units are not.

Joining costs nothing and the list is not capped. The Founding 500 get offered in list order once production is confirmed, which is the only sense in which your position on it matters. A founding unit carries an engraved sequential serial and the factory calibration record for that specific instrument, and it comes with OptiBreath Signal for life instead of for the first year. All of that at the price of a standard unit.

  • No payment and no card details. An email address, and nothing else
  • One email, when there is finally something to buy
  • Founding Edition serial and Signal for life, at the standard price
  • Leave the list in one click, from any email we send
Deploying across a team?Read the questions we get asked

Founding units ship Q1 2027 · General availability Q2 2027