Sex-tech startup MysteryVibe introduces wearable vibrator for men

Stephanie Alys knew from the start that she wanted MysteryVibe, the sex-tech company she co-founded, to be a consumer electronics company rather than something more niche.

She still loves the moment at tech conferences when she starts talking about sex and pleasure and people's expressions turn from smiles and giggles to curiosity and seriousness.

“I try to provide a different angle, some humour,” she says. “Surprising people is a way to open the door to show the seriousness of our vision.”

MysteryVibe’s Crescendo is a vibrator that can be bent in multiple ways and adapted to the body of the user. A version that fits around the penis, called Tenuto, is in production. But the mission is much bigger: “I want to change our perception of sex,” Alys says. “When people think about sex they think about the penis and vaginal penetration, but sex is so much more than that.”

The mission is gaining pace. This week MysteryVibe won the consumer product design category at the Design Week awards, beating the Apple Watch. Last year, it closed a funding round worth $1.5 million (£1.1 million) bringing the total raised by the company to $4 million in three years and valuing it at $13 million. Pre-orders are gathering apace for the Tenuto, which will launch in autumn.

MysteryVibe is part of a new wave of sex-tech companies changing perceptions. Announcing last year’s funding round, MysteryVibe cofounder Soumyadip Rakshit said: “We’re finding investors to be increasingly bullish about sextech. More importantly, they are now far more willing to back us than even a couple of years ago.

The sex-tech market, which is estimated to be worth $15 billion, has so far had very little outside investment. Rakshit says: “There’s huge potential, and that’s helped investors get over their initial reservations about the sector.”

Alys and Rakshit met working as management consultants at Deloitte in 2008. They began talking about a brand that fused tech and intimacy in a way that helped people, rather than detracting from the moment. Over the following years, the friends kept an eye on the market and on changing perceptions in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey, the hit erotic romance novel by E L James, published in 2011.

“It was a symptom of the deeper trend that conversations were changing,” Alys says. “People were starting to feel a bit less shame about talking about sex. It was starting to be considered a part of wellness, which is trend that is still growing.”

By 2014, Alys and Rakshit joined with Rakshit’s partner Shanshan Xu as chief financial officer and hardware designer Rob Weekly as head of tech to start MysteryVibe. “We got to a point where no one else was doing it, so we thought we should be the ones to do it."

While other peers might have shied away from sex tech as a career path, Alys saw a business opportunity and a way to make a difference by helping people create a deeper relationship with their own bodies. “Personally, it’s a topic that has always fascinated me,” she says. “I grew up with great sex ed and an understanding that it was an important part of life.”

At the same time the industry was maturing. Sex toys were changing from pink, plastic, penis-shaped items to more innovative, design-focused products. MysteryVibe learned there was demand for something different when they conducted an early focus-group asking people if they wanted products shaped like genitalia and they said no.

Alys and the co-founders set out to build a vibrator that was minutely bendable to adapt to the user’s body. “There were people who had tried to make bendable products before, but it’s complicated engineering,” she says. They took inspiration from the humble laptop hinge that has to bend hundreds of times and maintain its position.

But building hardware is expensive. By 2015, they went public with their idea on crowdfunding platform BORN. They hit their target of £50,000 to put towards a product with six motors, so that the device could pulse from lots of different angles, a music-mixer style app to make the vibrations fully customisable.

The Crescendo, which launched in 2016, has sold in 58 countries, which the app has been downloaded over 450,000 times. In 2017, MysteryVibe launched its Close the Gap campaign with advertising agency McCann. The billboards, timed to co-incide with Government reporting requirements on the disparity between male and female executive pay, revealed that the average man has three orgasms for every one experienced by the average woman.

MysteryVibe has 10 full time employees, but it benefits from partnerships like the one with McCann to secure talented staff who might not want to work full-time on sex-tech. Alys says: “We found early on that someone at uni wouldn't study to be part of the sex industry because of the stigma, so the tech talent would go to Google and the best designers would go to SeymourPowell, so for us working with agencies was a way to access that talent.”

MysteryVibe is now working on a new campaign to promote Tenuto, which is billed as “a customizable, smart vibrator worn around the base of a penis and perineum for a longer, harder, more intense sexual experience”.

It took two years to design and develop Tenuto in partnership with Seymourpowell, the team behind Durex toys, in response to calls from men who wanted their own wearable vibratior. The result, says Alys, is a device containing six vibrators that wrap around the penis, stimulating both wearer and partner.

“The traditional female side of the market is very well developed, whereas the traditional male side of the market is much less developed,” Alys says. “We want to create a luxury device that men and women will be proud to own and use.”