Oura

• Oura has sold more than 5.5 million rings since 2015, passed five million paid members, and doubled revenue in each of the last three years to approximately $1bn in 2025. Official guidance for 2026 is more than $1.5bn, with CEO Tom Hale indicating an upper case closer to $2bn. It was valued at $11bn in an October 2025 Series E and filed confidentially for a US listing on 21 May 2026.
• I believe Oura should not proceed with the listing. Instead, I propose that Apple should acquire the company. Apple has filed ring-related patents since 2019 and designs its own silicon and optical sensors, so building a ring sits within its engineering reach. What it would then have to assemble is what Oura already holds: a competitive foothold built over nearly a decade, which I would expect to cost Apple one to two years and substantial marketing expenditure to approach.
• Oura's September 2025 win at the International Trade Commission excluded Ultrahuman and RingConn rings from the US market and established its form-factor patents as valid, enforceable and infringed. An 'Apple Ring' designed in-house would launch into a category where the incumbent holds adjudicated exclusionary intellectual property, and acquiring Oura converts that obstacle into an owned asset.
• The ring complements the Apple Watch. The Watch is a screen-based communication and workout device charged daily, whereas the ring is worn continuously, including overnight; the addition would land in Wearables, Home and Accessories, the slowest-growing Apple segment at $7.90bn in the March quarter, up 5% against 17% for the group.
• Oura's March 2026 acquisition of Doublepoint, a Helsinki gesture-recognition company, gives the ring an input function alongside its sensing function. That maps directly onto Apple's purchase of Q.ai in January 2026, reported at $1.6bn to $2bn, and onto the screenless glasses roadmap which presumably inspired the acquisition.
• I expect an acquisition price of $20bn, being roughly 13x 2026 revenue and approximately 1.8x the Series E valuation; if so I imagine it would be structured 60% cash and 40% stock, or roughly $12bn against $8bn.

The Company

Background

Oura was founded in Oulu, Finland in 2013 by Petteri Lahtela, Kari Kivelä and Markku Koskela, three engineers drawn from the Nokia and Polar ecosystem in northern Finland. They worked from the proposition that the finger produces a stronger and cleaner pulse signal than the wrist, and therefore supports more accurate heart-rate variability and respiratory measurement.

The product is a titanium ring that tracks more than fifty physiological signals continuously, paired with an application and a paid membership that converts those signals into sleep, readiness and recovery scores. Oura has extended it beyond sleep measurement over the past two years. Health Panels brings laboratory blood testing inside the application, a partnership with Dexcom pipes continuous glucose data into the same interface, GLP-1 Insights serves members on weight-loss and diabetes therapies, and an AI advisor interprets the combined record. The Oura Ring 5, launched in May 2026, is 40% smaller than its predecessor with week-long battery life, and arrived alongside Health Radar, the company's proactive illness-detection feature.

Lahtela served as the first chief executive whilst the company raised more than $650,000 on Kickstarter in 2015, and the first-generation ring launched in March of that year. Tom Hale, the current CEO, was appointed in 2022, leveraging operational experience from senior roles at SurveyMonkey, HomeAway and Adobe. The company is now headquartered in San Francisco, with its European operations and approximately half its workforce remaining in Oulu.

Recently, sales volumes have grown steeply. Oura announced in September 2025 that it had sold more than 5.5 million rings since 2015, against 2.5 million in June 2024, with close to three million of those units sold during 2025 according to Fierce Healthcare. At the time of the IPO filing, the company reported that it possessed over five million paid members, a fourfold increase over two years, and that 80% of members renew after their first year. The ring is stocked in more than 4,600 retail locations, alongside partnerships with more than 1,200 organisations, including the United States Tennis Association and all 27 US National Teams.

Oura has also been an acquirer four times over, buying Proxy in 2023, Veri and Sparta Science in 2024, and Doublepoint in March 2026. Hale has described the direction as a cloud of wearables in which multiple sensors feed a single analytics engine. The Doublepoint purchase converts the ring from a device that only measures into one that can also instruct.

The company's enterprise segment, despite being less visible, possesses key strategic value. For instance, the company describes the US Department of Defense as its largest enterprise customer. It has worked with the DoD since 2019, and was awarded a contract of more than $96m in October 2024 to supply rings and analytics to the Defense Health Agency. It also announced manufacturing operations in Fort Worth, Texas in August 2025 dedicated to that work, with the enterprise platform deployed through Palantir's FedStart programme.

Financials

Oura disclosed revenue above $500m in 2024, approximately $1bn in 2025, and projections exceeding $1.5bn for 2026. Notably, Hale has separately told CNBC the year could close nearer $2bn; he has also said the business is profitable, but declined to give Fortune a figure in February 2026. Three consecutive years of doubling from a base above $500m is the substance of what a buyer like Apple would be paying for. However, the deceleration from 100% growth to roughly 50%, is the first evidence that the curve is flattening—this is useful context pre-IPO.

The division between hardware and membership revenue is not disclosed, but membership priced in the region of $70 a year against more than five million paid members implies an annualised subscription run-rate approaching $350m (per my own estimate). On that basis, roughly three quarters of 2026 revenue remains device sales. Thus, device revenue may depend on continued unit growth in a way recurring revenue does not, and it carries the working capital and component exposure of a hardware business, so the quality of the revenue base sits below what the membership headline implies. The 80% renewal rate indicates the subscription element is durable where it exists, and it compounds mechanically as the installed base grows even in years when unit sales flatten. That is the argument for the multiple expanding over time rather than now.

Valuation marks run from approximately $2.55bn in 2022, through $5.2bn at the $200m Series D in December 2024, to $11bn at the Series E announced in October 2025, a doubling of the mark in ten months. Total capital raised exceeds $1.5bn, and Nasdaq Private Market estimated a share price of $50.98 as of 10 July 2026. PitchBook records that Oura grew at more than 100% in the year to its Series E while Garmin's fitness category grew 41%, so the private marks have been underwritten by outperformance of the category rather than by [investor] sentiment alone.

Funding

The Series E raised more than $900m led by Fidelity Management & Research, with ICONIQ joining as a new investor and participation from Whale Rock and Atreides, as CNBC reported. Fidelity had also led the Series D, alongside a separate $75m strategic investment from Dexcom. Earlier investors include Forerunner Ventures, The Chernin Group, Temasek, Gradient Ventures, Block, Elysian Park Ventures, JAZZ Venture Partners, Eisai and Lifeline Ventures.

Eli Lilly took an equity stake on 15 July 2026, which Dealroom characterised as an extension of the Series E. It followed a LillyDirect collaboration announced in June under which LillyDirect customers receive a complimentary Oura sizing kit, explicitly without data sharing, and it sits against the more than 100,000 members who have logged GLP-1 use in the application. I read the Lilly investment as commercial rather than pre-acquisitive: a pharmaceutical company securing adherence infrastructure around its own therapies, at what is presumably a small percentage holding, not a platform buyer positioning for control. It nonetheless raises the number of parties whose consent a change of control requires. A strategic investor with a live commercial agreement is a party an acquirer must satisfy rather than simply pay.

Unlike other companies which I’ve previously covered, Oura is the first which has undergone a redomiciliation. Oura did so in early 2026, where Oura Inc., the American entity, replaced the Finnish parent Oura Health Oy, with the European base retained in Oulu. The founders' exit and the absence of any disclosed dual-class arrangement leave the decision with an institutionally concentrated shareholder base whose members invested to realise a return on a defined horizon. The question is therefore one of price and timing rather than founder conviction, which is the opposite of the position at a company like Sweetgreen (previously covered).

Market and competitive positioning

IDC recorded smart ring shipments rising roughly 51% in 2025, with Oura leading the category, and forecasts approximately 5 million units in 2026, up 12.8%. Against that sits a smartwatch market of 160 million units, which IDC expects to decline 2.8% on memory-driven price pressure, with Apple at 21.5% of units in the first quarter of 2026. Oura's own reported volumes sit close to those ring category totals, which I take as evidence that the unit forecasts understate the category rather than that the company's disclosures are wrong. The divergence between a ring category growing above 50% and a smartwatch category contracting is a useful signal.

Samsung launched the Galaxy Ring in 2024 at $399 with no subscription, and its successor has been delayed to early 2027 following weak sales and the ITC dispute. That leaves the premium end of the category without a credible second option through late 2026. Ultrahuman and RingConn were both excluded from the US market by the ITC in October 2025, with RingConn subsequently settling and taking a royalty-bearing licence from Oura, and Circular having licensed a year earlier; the low-cost tier now competes in the United States either on Oura's terms or not at all. Whoop raised $575m at a $10.1bn valuation in March 2026 and Google announced a screenless Fitbit in May. Both price and populate the adjacent recovery-tracking position on the wrist without contesting the ring.

Given Apple’s dominance in hardware, it is difficult to exclude it from the category. As such, I would consider it to be adjacent and proximal to the [smart] ring market. It holds 2.5 billion active devices, an installed base which presumably overlaps heavily with Oura's own customers, ring-related patent filings going back several years, and from Q4 a chief executive drawn from hardware engineering. Bloomberg reporter and Apple insider Mark Gurman reported in October 2024 that Apple had no plans for a ring, precisely because of cannibalisation risks with the Apple Watch. Hale himself said in November 2024 that he doubted Apple would proceed, on the same cannibalisation logic. I find it particularly interesting that the market has anticipated and prematurely rejected developing a ring product; noticeably, however, no speculator has ruled out an acquisition [by Apple] like the one I am proposing.

IPO vs M&A

IPO?

Oura submitted a draft registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission on 21 May 2026, first reported by Bloomberg, with no share count or price range set and a listing targeted for later in the year. Forbes, citing the Bloomberg report, named Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Allen & Co and Jefferies as working on the offering. Neither the exchange nor the share-class structure has been reported, though the company has confirmed a Form S-1 rather than a foreign private issuer filing, consistent with the aforementioned redomiciliation.

The offering would market category leadership at approximately three quarters of global ring shipments, a brand with genuine consumer recognition, revenue doubling for a third consecutive year, an improving subscription rate, adjudicated intellectual property and a strategic pharmaceutical investor. I do not argue that a listing would fail. Instead, my argument is that an acquisition by Apple would be infinitesmally more beneficial for Oura and its investors, Apple, and for us, as consumers.

There are, however, two objections. First, Oura is a genuine category creator, with a defensible patent position, a platform strategy, and a European identity that a listing would preserve and an American acquisition would erase. Second, a company growing at 50% today has strong long-run potential, so selling into an open IPO window is selling early. Both are reasonable. I would answer that the first is a question of preference rather than of value, and that the second assumes Oura controls the variable that determines its growth rate—and by extension, its multiple—which it does not.

Should Oura list, its stock runs the risk of mild volatility in the event of an implied benchmark against Apple’s wearables products. In this case, Fitbit serves as the partial precedent. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2015 as the leader in fitness tracking, lost share to Apple and Samsung over the following four years, and was sold to Google for $2.1bn in a transaction announced in November 2019. Oura holds patents Fitbit did not and sells into a category Apple has not yet entered, so the parallel only goes so far, but the underlying narrative holds.

M&A?

Apple has filed ring-related patents since 2019, designs its own silicon and optical sensors, and could build the hardware. I would expect Apple to need one to two years and substantial marketing expenditure to approach that from launch, during which Oura continues to compound and Apple competes against an incumbent whose brand within this specific category is stronger than its own. The build-versus-buy question turns on go-to-market, and go-to-market is the half of the problem that capital addresses slowly.

Apple's own health programme supports the case. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported in February 2026 that Apple had scaled back Project Mulberry, the AI health coach intended to launch as Health+, and would release individual features into the Health application over time. That retreat followed considerable turnover: chief operating officer Jeff Williams retired, health and fitness moved under services chief Eddy Cue, and the machine learning organisation previously run by John Giannandrea was folded into Craig Federighi's software group ahead of his retirement. I read Apple's difficulty in health as organisational rather than technical, and an organisational gap is closed by buying a functioning health company, its science team and its subscription product intact.

Apple closed its purchase of Q.ai in January 2026 at a reported $1.6bn to $2bn, technology that reads facial micro-movements to interpret silent speech and, on its patent filings, can track heart and respiration rate; silicon chief Johny Srouji described it in terms of imaging and machine learning. Apple is assembling a distributed set of passive sensors feeding a single health model across glasses, audio devices and the wrist, and the ring is the only device in that set that can be worn continuously overnight at battery lives the Watch does not approach. Doublepoint's pinch detection, paired with eye tracking, is the same interaction model Vision Pro already uses. That makes an acquired Oura an input device for screenless glasses as well as a sensor, and Proxy adds an identity and access function to these.

Thesis

Oura should be acquired by Apple rather than listed, at $20bn, structured 60% cash and 40% stock, in a window running from the leadership handover on 1 September 2026 to the first quarter of 2027. In return, Apple obtains a customer base it would otherwise spend one to two years and considerable marketing expenditure assembling, a paying relationship with people who already own its phones, and the health operating capability its internal programmes do not produce. Oura's institutional investors receive a return meaningfully above the Series E mark, without holding the company through the period in which the risk of Apple entering the category is highest.