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Ōura, the maker of health-tracking smart rings popular with celebrities and business executives, has raised $200mn in new funding, doubling its valuation since 2022 to $5.2bn.
Founded in Finland in 2013, Ōura’s latest deal is one of the largest for a private European tech company outside of the artificial intelligence sector, which has absorbed a disproportionate share of venture capital funding this year.
Fidelity Management led Ōura’s latest round alongside US-based glucose-monitoring group Dexcom, taking its total capital raised to more than $550mn, according to the company.
Celebrity aficionados of Ōura rings include Prince Harry, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston, executives at IBM and Delta, as well as Silicon Valley founders such as Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia.
Its growing popularity has seen sales more than double this year to about $500mn, with total rings sold surpassing 2.5mn.
Ōura said the funds would allow it to expand its products into new categories, invest in AI and fuel international expansion, as well as possible acquisitions.
Tom Hale, Ōura chief executive, said the new capital would help the company go “beyond the ring”, potentially into regulated medical applications.
“Our position has been that we want to be clinical grade in a consumer package,” he said. “At some point we might cross over that Rubicon. Having some extra capital on the balance sheet is a way you might approach that.”
Ōura got its start on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, in 2016. While Kickstarter also helped launch Oculus, the virtual reality headset maker that was acquired by Facebook for $2bn in 2014, many other crowdfunded consumer electronics start-ups from the mid-2010s have since folded or been acquired.
Hale attributes Ōura’s ability to keep raising venture capital to its subscription-based business model, which “gives us a gross margin that looks more like a software company than a hardware company”.
Its rings, which cost upwards of $349 for the latest Oura 4 model plus a $5.99-a-month subscription, track the wearer’s sleep, heart rate, body temperature and activity. A smartphone app turns this data into a personalised “Readiness Score” and offers advice on how to improve it.
Those features have boosted Ōura’s customer retention, Hale said. “With most wearables, after a year a big chunk of them go in the drawer,” he said, but many Ōura customers keep using them for several years.
Ōura’s early focus on sleep tracking helped it hit “a particular sweet spot with a particular customer set”, he added — including many of its future investors. “Almost everyone who invested in the company used the product.”
The wearable technology and fitness tracker market has long been dominated by smartwatches such as the Apple Watch. However, unit shipments of smartwatches are expected to decline 3 per cent this year, according to estimates from market research group IDC.
By contrast, unit shipments of rings are growing 88 per cent, IDC said, making them the fastest-growing kind of wearable device alongside smart glasses such as Meta’s camera-toting Ray-Bans. The researcher forecasts smart ring shipments will grow from 1.7mn this year to 3.1mn in 2028.
Bigger tech companies are starting to take notice of Ōura’s success, with Samsung launching its Galaxy Ring in July. But Hale said the new competition from the South Korean tech giant had not dented sales “at all”.
“If anything, it’s probably made it better and easier to explain the concept of a [smart] ring,” he said. “Most people understand the world of wearables as smartwatches. Having Samsung as a validator helps us.”
