🧠 Takeaways:
Oura owns the smart rings. Rev +74% to $1.2B. Then it spent $1.17B buying back stock. And 73% of the IPO is existing holders selling.
Become the health hub. Pull every wearable into Oura.
Split the membership. $9.99 Connected, $19.99 AI Health.
Turn the ring into jewelry. Tiffany, Cartier, Bulgari drops at $1,500+.
Let’s Examine This Biz
Note: As always, none of what follows is legal, tax, investing, financial, or any other sort of advice. And I was never here 😉.
Oura (the Finnish sleep ring that quietly became a $1.2B women's health biz) is going out at a ~$13.5B market cap for their IPO.
They’re printing money, but using the IPO to cash out vs. raise a war chest which gives me pause.
Today we're waiting for the classic 50% drawdown then jumping in.
Financial Summary
IPO Price Range: $40-$44/share
Implied Market Cap: ~$13.5B
P/E Ratio: ~228x TTM
FY 2025 Financial Statements (YoY Comparison)
Rev: $1.2B (+74%) 💪
Gross Profit: $662M (+86%) 💪
OPEX: $591M (+100%) 😬
Net Income: $61M (+3,763%) 👍
FCF: $262M (+114%) 🤩
TLDR Analysis: Great Ring. Cash-grab IPO.
Rev +74%. Cooling from +131% the year before.
Blended GM 55%. Membership (App) GM 89%.
OPEX +100%. Faster than rev. G&A +132% on IPO prep and IP lawsuits.
FCF $262M. 21.6% margin.
Overall a really strong biz that looks like it has plenty of growth potential. OPEX is the fastest growing line item, but there are a lot of IPO related expenses they are incurring this year.
I’d really rather see more growth than share buy backs leading into an IPO.
Competitive Benchmarking
Metric | Oura (FY25) | Garmin Fitness (FY25) | Apple Wearables/Home/Acc (FY25) | Whoop (2025E, private) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Rev Growth | +123% | +33% | -3.6% | +103% (est.) |
Gross Margin | 51.9% | 58.7% (co.-wide) | n/d | n/d |
Operating Margin | 5.0% | ~30.8% | n/d | n/d |
FCF Margin | 11.0% | n/d | n/d | n/d |
Net Income Margin | ~0.0%* | 22.9% (co.-wide) | n/d | n/d |
Membership | $69.99/yr + ring | none | n/a | $199-$359/yr, strap incl. |
*Tax valuation allowance artifact. 9M FY26 net margin: 5.0%. Whoop figures are Sacra estimates.
Let’s TLDR This Biz
Founded:
2013 in Oulu, Finland. Petteri Lahtela, Kari Kivela and Markku Koskela.
First ring hit Kickstarter in 2016.
Aha Moment:
2020. COVID. The NBA used Oura in its bubble.
A ring reading your temp overnight could flag sickness before you felt it.
Insight: health beats fitness. CEO Tom Hale's words: fitness is "a churny use case."
Growth:
Gen3 in Oct 2021 w/ a $5.99/mo membership. Ring 4 in Oct 2024.
~8,400 retail doors. ~40% of new members come from word of mouth.
Model:
Ring upfront (~$311 avg). Membership monthly ($5.99).
94% of activations convert to paid. 5.0M paid members. 85% 12-month retention.
The ring pays back acquisition cost on day 1.
Where We Are Now:
Tom Hale CEO since 2022. Moved from Finland to the US in March 2026.
IPO pricing at $40-$44.
Forerunner is selling 100% of its 28.7M shares (~$1.2B at $42).
Eli Lilly ($100M) and Dragoneer ($300M) lined up as buyers.
Let’s Fix This Biz
Here are the 3 ways we're turning Oura from a ring company into the health platform Eli Lilly couldn’t resist buying.
1) Become the Health Hub
Oura’s app is great, but the Deca-Billion $$ opportunity is to become the #1 health app all users log into during the day.
Someone has to be that for the non-Apple tech nerd.
37% of new members already wear another wearable next to Oura. 29% replaced one.
A third of new members pay for 2 devices. Oura's app can't see the second one.
The pipes already exist. All the fitness apps (Garmin, Whoop and Fitbit) sync into Apple Health and Google Health Connect.
Oura needs to sync into this data from other devices and become the one app that hosts all your health data.
They owns ~42B hours of biometric data. 1,200+ partners. 5.0M paid members. They claim the Ring is the best heart health data a wearable will collect and heavily push Sleep tracking as the next benefit.
Put the ring's overnight temp and HRV at the center. Layer Garmin runs, Stelo glucose and Flo cycles on top. Give their customer (mostly female) the complete view of their health, body and tracking.
Takeaway: The data is the goldmine.
2) Build more Membership Tiers
Oura currently charges users $5.99/mo (~$81/yr for their app). Once Oura syncs all the health info across all of your data points. Build 3 tiers:
Keep $5.99 for ring-only.
Connected, $9.99/mo. Doctor sync for all your data.
AI Tele-health, $19.99/mo. AI poweredGLP-1/metabolic + Sleep + Women’s Health programs.
At 89% GM the biz would be adding $100m in high margin Rev to the biz every year.
Apple is driving to this outcome as well, but they won’t be the only game in town. There will be multiple winners in the connected Health device game.
Oura is the only major ring provider while everyone else is competing for wrist space. They need to monetize their difference.
Takeaway: Always give customers more options to spend more.
3) Luxury Drops to hit a $2k Price point.
Avg ring price keeps sliding. $332 (FY24). $326 (FY25). $311 (FY26).
Their Ring 5 model starts at $399.
If you’ve read the newsletter for a while you know my 10x theory.
And Oura has already had a successful test here. Launching the Gucci x Oura ($950) for 18k gold ring which sold out in weeks.
Apple doesn't sell jewelry. Neither do Garmin or Whoop. Annnd 72% of Oura’s customers are women. They have an enormous opportunity to make more rings more expensive to maintain their sales price.
Someone probably won’t buy 10 Oura rings. But they will either uplevel their current ring for a great piece of jewelry. OR they’ll buy multiple to swap with their outfits.
So make the $2K ring ring. Then run the drops:
Tiffany & Co. (LVMH): smart engagement ring + wedding band. Couples sets.
Cartier: Love and Juste un Clou.
Bulgari (LVMH): B.zero1 is already a band. Add sensors.
Chaumet (LVMH): Paris bridal. A door into Europe.
Louis Vuitton (LVMH): monogram drops.
Eight Sleep: Pod + ring bundle. Sync the data
Equinox: a ring edition built into the top membership tier.
Then give people reasons to own more than 1. Stacking. Numbered seasonal drops. 1 membership across every ring. Trade-in credit.
If they get the premium/luxury segment to 5% of ~4.1M rings at $1,500.
~207K rings. +$246M hardware rev. + make the brand more desirable.
Takeaway: Always give customers an excuse to spend more.
Final Thought
I'm all for giving early team/investors liquidity. But the volume of stock Oura bought back heading into this IPO is exactly what I don't want to see from a biz at this stage of growth.
The receipts:
$1.17B spent buying back stock in the 9 mos. ending June 2026. Another $432.6M still owed when they filed.
36.5M of the 50M IPO shares (73%) are existing holders selling. Not new shares being sold.
Forerunner sold $65M back to Oura in Feb at ~$20/share. Now it's selling 100% of what's left. ~$1.2B at $42.
~$526.4M of the ~$532.6M Oura actually raises, goes to employee RSU tax withholding.
Revolver went from $0 drawn to $375M. Cash: $372M. Debt: $380M.
The IPO isn't funding the next chapter. It's mostly liquidating previous investors. Some of that needs to happen in an IPO, but they aren’t raising enough to:
Have enough money to burn for growth.
Building a war chest for a downturn.
Have significant capital for M&A.
If the company was coming into the IPO with 0 debt on a $700m+ revolver + raising another $500m in fresh case to deploy this biz would be unstoppable.
They could platform all of it if they owned a diabetes tracker, a menopause tracker, a fertility app or another connected device. They already partner w/ Flo. Flo hit a $1B+ valuation in 2024. If they internalize these features they’ll become much more valuable.
People will eventually stop buying rings. Rings Sold growth already cooled from 131% -> 75%.
So where are the other form factors? Where are the other integrations? Where does Oura become impossible to replace, impossible to rip out for existing customers?
Hims ($6B) wouldn’t be out of reach. But instead it’s a major cash out moment.
This is a private equity move. Not the IPO of the leading consumer health brand of the next 2 decades.
