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Oura, the maker of health-tracking smart rings popular with celebrities and executives, has raised $200 million in new funding, doubling its valuation to $5.2 billion starting in 2022.
The latest deal makes Oura, founded in Finland in 2013, one of the largest private technology companies in Europe outside of artificial intelligence, with the company receiving a disproportionate share of its venture capital funding this year. is absorbed.
Fidelity Management led Oura’s latest round in collaboration with US-based glucose monitoring group Dexcom, bringing the total raised to more than $550 million, according to the company.
Ouraring’s celebrity enthusiasts include Prince Harry, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, executives from IBM and Delta, as well as Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia. This includes Silicon Valley founders such as
Due to its growing popularity, sales more than doubled this year to about $500 million, with total sales of more than 2.5 million rings.
Oura said the funding will allow the company to expand its products into new categories, invest in AI to accelerate international expansion, and even increase the possibility of acquisitions.
Oura CEO Tom Hale said the new capital will help the company move “beyond the ring” and into regulated medical applications.
“Our position is that we want to be clinical grade in consumer packaging,” he said. “One day we might cross that Rubicon. Putting some additional capital on the balance sheet is the way to approach it.”
Oura started its business in 2016 on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Kickstarter also helped launch Oculus, the virtual reality headset maker that was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, but since the mid-2010s, many other crowdfunded consumer electronics startups have also been crowdfunding. We assisted with the ding. It has since folded or been acquired.
Hale credits Oura’s ability to continue raising venture capital to its subscription-based business model, which “offers gross margins that are more like a software company than a hardware company.” “There are.”
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Its rings, which cost upwards of $349 for the latest Oura 4 model, plus a $5.99 monthly subscription, track the wearer’s sleep, heart rate, body temperature, and activity. The smartphone app converts this data into a personalized “readiness score” and provides advice on how to improve it.
These features have improved Oura’s customer retention rate, Hale said. “Most wearables end up sitting pretty in a drawer after a year,” he said, but many of Oura’s customers stick with them for several years.
Oura’s early focus on sleep tracking allowed it to hit “certain sweet spots with specific customer groups,” including many of its future investors, he added. “Almost everyone who invested in the company was using the product.”
The wearable technology and fitness tracker market has long been dominated by smartwatches like the Apple Watch. However, market research group IDC estimates that smartwatch shipments are expected to decline by 3% this year.
In contrast, Ring shipments have increased by 88%, making it the fastest-growing wearable device along with smart glasses such as Meta’s camera-equipped Ray-Bans, IDC said. Researchers predict smart ring shipments will increase from 1.7 million this year to 3.1 million by 2028.
Major technology companies are also beginning to take notice of Oura’s success, with Samsung releasing the Galaxy Ring in July. But Hale said new competition from South Korean tech giants has not slowed sales “at all.”
“If anything, it probably made it better and easier to explain the (smart) ring concept,” he said. “Most people understand the world of wearables as smartwatches. What Samsung is doing as a validator will help us.”
