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OptiBreath
Waitlist open · 500 founding places

You cannot feel the air getting worse.

By eleven o'clock your closed office is past 1,200 ppm of CO₂ and still climbing. The published research puts a number on what that costs your decision-making — and you have no receptor that can detect any of it. OptiBreath is the instrument that can.

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No payment, no card details — an email address and nothing else. Founding units ship Q1 2027, and you decide whether to buy one when we email you — not now.

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

The variable nobody is watching

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

Outdoor air sits around 425 ppm of CO₂. One person in a closed 12 m² office at half an air change per hour crosses 1,000 ppm in about seventy-five minutes and settles near 1,700. In a controlled study at that first threshold, six of nine measures of complex decision-making fell — initiative and strategy hardest. Nothing about the room feels different.

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, not 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

We publish the counter-evidence too. It is the only way this claim is worth anything.

How it works

Measure, classify, intervene.

Three jobs. An instrument that does the first two and stops is a gadget.

  1. 01

    It measures what you cannot feel

    Human beings have no receptor for carbon dioxide at indoor concentrations. You will notice the room is warm long before you notice it has passed 1,400 ppm. A dual-channel NDIR cell samples every second and holds ±(30 ppm + 3%) across the full range.

  2. 02

    It tells you which band you are in

    Raw numbers are for engineers. The display resolves the whole suite into one of six bands drawn straight from the published exposure conditions — Baseline through Critical — so a glance is enough to know whether the room is costing you anything.

  3. 03

    It tells you when to act, and when not to

    OptiBreath models your specific room's decay curve — its volume, its air changes per hour, how fast it recovers when you open a window. Then it tells you the shortest intervention that gets you back to Optimal, and stays quiet the rest of the time.

The suite

CO₂ is the headline. It is not the whole story.

Ventilation tells you how much outside air the room is getting. It says nothing about what is in the air already. Nine channels, sampled every second, resolved into one status you can read from across the room.

  • CO₂

    Carbon dioxide

    The headline number. It tracks ventilation per occupant in real time, and it is the variable with the most direct published link to decision-making performance.

    RANGE
    400 – 10,000 ppm
    ACCURACY
    ±(30 ppm + 3% of reading)
  • PM1 / PM2.5 / PM10

    Particulate matter

    Fine particulate is the pollutant with the strongest long-term health evidence, and indoor spikes from cooking, printing and traffic ingress are invisible without an optical counter.

    RANGE
    0 – 1,000 µg/m³
    ACCURACY
    ±(5 µg/m³ + 5% of reading)
  • tVOC

    Volatile organic compounds

    Off-gassing from furniture, whiteboard markers, cleaning products and electronics accumulates in exactly the sealed rooms where CO₂ climbs. Reported together, they separate 'stale' from 'contaminated'.

    RANGE
    VOC index 0 – 500
    ACCURACY
    Relative index, self-baselining over 24 h
  • T / RH

    Temperature & humidity

    Thermal comfort has one of the best-established links to office task performance, and relative humidity drives both viral survival and how dry your eyes feel by 4pm.

    RANGE
    −10 – 60 °C · 0 – 100 % RH
    ACCURACY
    ±0.1 °C · ±1.0 % RH
  • hPa

    Barometric pressure

    Not a headline metric — it is there so the NDIR reading stays accurate at altitude and through weather swings, automatically.

    RANGE
    300 – 1,250 hPa
    ACCURACY
    ±0.5 hPa
  • lux

    Ambient light

    Drives the display's automatic brightness, and feeds the circadian view in the app — light exposure timing is one of the few environmental levers with a stronger evidence base than CO₂.

    RANGE
    0.01 – 60,000 lux
    ACCURACY
    ±10%
  • HCHO

    Formaldehyde

    Pro

    The one VOC worth measuring specifically rather than as an index. New furniture, engineered flooring and recent renovation are the usual sources, and it outgasses for months.

    RANGE
    0 – 1,000 ppb
    ACCURACY
    ±(20 ppb + 10% of reading)
  • NO₂

    Nitrogen dioxide

    Pro

    The marker for combustion ingress — gas hobs, garages, and street-level traffic pulled in through a window or a poorly sited intake.

    RANGE
    0 – 2,000 ppb
    ACCURACY
    ±(15 ppb + 15% of reading)
  • Rn

    Radon

    Pro

    A long-integration measurement rather than a live one, and the only figure on this list that is a leading cause of lung cancer. If you work from a basement or ground floor, you want it.

    RANGE
    0 – 20,000 Bq/m³
    ACCURACY
    ±10% at 200 Bq/m³ after 7 days

Sensing principles, resolutions and tier availability are listed in full on the instrument page.

Who this is for

People whose output is judgement, not throughput.

If your work is repetitive, air quality costs you a little. If your work is a small number of consequential decisions, it costs you a great deal — and the studies show exactly that pattern, with the largest decrements on the most open-ended tasks.

  • Staff and principal engineers

    Your day is four hours of deep architectural reasoning and a lot of meetings in rooms with the door shut. Initiative and strategy are the two measures that fell furthest in the chamber studies. They are also your entire job description.

  • Founders and operators

    You make a small number of decisions with a very long tail. The 3pm call in a sealed board room, made at 1,900 ppm, is not one you get to re-run because the ventilation was underspecified.

  • Quants, researchers and clinicians

    You already control for sleep, caffeine timing, and light exposure. Indoor air is the last uninstrumented variable in your working environment, and it moves more over a single morning than any of the others.

The arithmetic

At a fully-loaded cost of €900 a day, OptiBreath Core is worth less than half a day of your time. It has a decade of service life and no consumables. The question is not whether it pays for itself — it is whether the effect is real, which is why we put the evidence, including what argues against us, before the checkout.

Specification, not adjectives

±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.

Pricing

Three configurations. One instrument.

Buy the hardware once. Everything the device does on your desk, it does forever — with or without a subscription, with or without us.

Most wanted

OptiBreath Core

For the individual whose output is judgement.

€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, 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 — no account required for the device to work
Join the waitlist

Q1 2027

OptiBreath Pro

For people who need the number to hold up under scrutiny.

€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
  • Local REST and MQTT APIs, Prometheus exporter, and outbound webhooks
  • Wired Ethernet and PoE through the desk dock
Join the waitlist

Q1 2027

OptiBreath Fleet

For the organisation that wants the building to keep up with the payroll.

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 — 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 comparison

Nothing is charged today. 60-day return once units ship, 3-year warranty on Core and 5 on Pro.

The first 500 units are numbered.

An engraved sequential serial, your unit's own factory calibration record, OptiBreath Signal for life, and first position in the queue — at the same price as a standard unit. No payment, no card details — an email address and nothing else. We email you when production is confirmed, and you decide then.

Claim a founding placeDeploying across a team?

Founding units ship Q1 2027 · General availability Q2 2027