Once you start looking for Oura’s health-tracking rings — thick, unassuming silver or gold bands — you see them everywhere. If you were paying attention, you’d also notice that the type of person wearing them has also begun to change.
The rings, whose sensors sit around the index finger to collect markers like blood flow and body temperature to monitor and make predictions about the wearer’s health, were adopted early by male members of the tech industry — more inclined to obsess over metrics and self-optimization, so the stereotype goes. This data is sent to the Oura app through the wearer’s phone, where they can track biometrics including body temperature, heart rate variability, and where their dashboard and AI-powered health “advisor” delivers insights and health predictions based on what these metrics say about the wearer’s sleep quality, stress levels and activity. Oura CEO Tom Hale fits this bill; he is wearing a silver version of the device on one hand and a white ceramic iteration on the other during our interview at the Web Summit in Lisbon last week.
But Hale is keen to underline how these days, he no longer fits the typical profile of the Oura wearer. Where sleep tracking — the Oura ring’s initial pull — was what Hale calls “the Trojan horse” for the business, due to the clarity of biometric data that can be collected over the long stretch that the wearer is asleep, he credits Oura’s rapid sales acceleration over the last two years to its expansion into women’s health features and its adoption among younger consumers. Hale, in particular, saw an opportunity to capitalize on our current culture’s growing obsession with wellness.
“We saw that with women’s health there were a lot of unsolved problems and underserved customers, and wearables weren’t doing a great job of solving those needs,” Hale says. “Here’s the powerful insight: a woman’s physiology changes every 30 days; my body doesn’t change that much. From working out the best time to exercise to when to try to conceive, there were so many areas for us to focus on. So we doubled down on women’s health and it’s paid off immensely — women have flocked to Oura and it’s driven our growth through the roof.”
Fresh off a $900 million series E funding round last month, which valued the company at $11 billion, Hale says Oura has doubled its sales every year since 2022. Looking ahead, he expects Oura to reach more than $1.5 billion in sales in 2026, as the company doubles down on its health features and expands into more geographies. Originally founded in Finland, Oura has undergone significant international expansion over the last year into retailers in more than 20 countries, including the UK, where Hale says business has grown 290% in the last year. Oura has also recently entered Germany, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The US — where the consumer obsession with wellness and longevity is leading the way globally — is Oura’s biggest market.
“Show me the business around here that’s growing 100% year-on-year, isn’t losing money, and is a billion dollars in revenue,” Hale says, looking around the conference hall. “I guarantee you we are literally it.”
Gen Z women driving growth
Oura, which launched its first ring in 2015, introduced women’s health features with period predictions in late 2022. It was soon followed by contraception, after it partnered with the FDA-approved birth control app Natural Cycles, which says it uses body temperature to “prevent and plan for pregnancy naturally”. It then expanded to include hormonal cycle insights in 2023 and pregnancy insights in 2024. Oura’s AI-powered “advisor” uses the ring’s data to make predictions of where the wearer is in their cycle, as well as suggestions for why the wearer may be more fatigued than usual, or the type of exercise they should engage in during that phase.
Oura’s early customer, according to Hale, averaged at 35 years old, with a “perfect bell curve” straddling either side. Now, the company is seeing this curve “shift to the left”, with the fastest-growing customer segment being Gen Zs between 18 and 25 years old. Sales among women grew 250% in the last year, while men’s sales grew 75%, he adds.
This tracks with general research into the demographics of wearables owners (the majority of whom own an Apple watch, the first wearable device to reach mass adoption). A comprehensive recent study of 3,021 hospital patients in the US found that 62% of women own a wearable device, over 53% of men, for example. Gen Zs were also most likely to own a wearable device (71%), over millennials (69%) and Gen Xs (65%).
Oura rings cost between $349 for the Oura Ring 4 in silver and black to $499 for the Oura Ring 4 in gold and rose gold, as well as for all new ceramic finishes. Once purchased, Oura charges a $5.99 monthly or $69.99 annual subscription fee to access the smartphone app that shares insights from the device. It’s a price point that’s on a par with a smartphone, rather than pocket money for most Gen Z teens. Hale says 11% of Oura’s customers have an annual income of $50,000 or less — for them, paying for the ring is a clear financial priority.
Experts say Gen Zs in particular are propagating the luxury preventative health and wellness trend, and are very engaged with health data and education. They often arrive at wellness brands promising preventative health solutions — from stress management to hormone regulation — through their own proactive research, rather than in response to pre-existing conditions. At the same time, preventative health has become something of a status symbol among consumers more broadly. Luxury, once defined by a large focus on possessions, has shifted to self-optimization. Wearing an Oura ring is one of the clearest ways to signal that you’re prioritising the new luxury apex — a higher, more sustained state of “wellness”.
Next, Oura is targeting women going through the menopause. It launched its first product for older women, a “perimenopause checker”, this August, for wearers to track their menopause symptoms.
The form factor
Unlike with smart glasses, where tech brands have partnered with luxury counterparts to equip wearables with the design expertise and “cool” factor necessary for people to want them, Oura has kept its design strictly in-house.
Last year, the company hired former Apple executive Miklu Silvanto — who spent nearly a decade working under Jony Ive — as its chief design officer. The first big design update released under Silvanto was Oura’s collection of four ceramic rings, launched last month. As I speak with Silvanto, he hints at more materials and colorways further down the line.
“If you want to make a tech device that people want to wear on their bodies, you need to care more than most other people do,” Silvanto says. “We believe, somewhat uniquely I think, that what we’re designing is at the intersection of jewelry, fashion and industrial design. So we don’t want to operate within the confines of some kind of industrial design prison. A lot of wearables and a lot of consumer electronics design-wise operate with the rules, materials and toolkit of industrial design. But the Oura team works with a much broader application of creativity, rather than just the specific skills of industrial design.”
Although the Oura ring’s metallic and ceramic finishes resemble jewelry, it typically measures at 2.8mm in thickness, protruding more than a typical ring. Silvanto hints that Oura is working on reducing the thickness of its rings further, and could add more intricate design details to its plain iterations.
“With the ceramic ring, you see some of the first glimpses of what the future Ouras are going to look like — we picked a material that’s really different from most other variables. We’ve been quite daring and contemporary with our color choices, and we’re going to be even bolder in the future,” Silvanto says.
“Ultimately, the whole history of technology is that smaller objects are able to do more and more jobs — it’s almost like a graduation,” he continues. “I think the ring is going to be able to do some pretty magical things in the near future, which arrive with slightly different materials and detailing and things that enable a certain volume of material to perform those functions.”
The only time Oura has partnered with an external brand was on the Gucci x Oura Ring in 2022. Two runs of the design sold out in five weeks, according to Hale. The CEO adds that while Oura is in constant conversations with luxury brands, the tech behind the ring is developing so fast that limited-edition variations could become obsolete.
“I’m not ruling out future collabs, but if you buy a $20,000 ring and it runs out of battery in three years, what do we do? Do you send it back to us and we melt it down and put the new tech in? We haven’t figured out the cost model for that yet,” he says. “So for us right now, it’s less about: are we Gucci? Are we luxury? It’s more about: how can we deliver the utility in a way that expresses your style? The fashion industry is about signaling — not virtue, but value. There’s a generalized global movement toward having agency with our health. So for now, we’re focused on delivering that value.”
A data game
Oura’s commercial advantage is the vast amount of longitudinal data it’s collected from its customers’ biometric markers throughout the day and night. The device works best if users never take it off. For Oura, this constant data collection has opened the door to several ongoing conversations with healthcare systems around the world, Hale says.
“I think they understand that Oura is a range of digital health solutions. One of the things that we do really well is that engagement. We have attention. We have high-quality data. We are building AI solutions. We have a clinical-grade kind of confidence,” Hale says, adding that 11% of Oura’s customers are clinicians. “What they’re saying is this is the one [health tracker] we choose because it’s the most accurate, it’s the most oriented around it.”
Oura hired its first chief medical officer, physician Ricky Bloomfield, MD, who previously led Apple Health, in March this year. Since then, Hale says Dr Bloomfield has hired a team of clinicians. He also says Oura has “35 PhDs” who are doing that “raw biophysical research” on the way your biology interacts. “We need humans to be part of the care,” Hale adds.
A key challenge with wearable devices has been captivating consumers long enough to ensure consistent wear — some studies have found that more than half of fitness tracker owners abandoned their devices within a month of purchase. Hale, however, says Oura has no such problem. Although Oura does not disclose specific customer-retention figures, Hale says that Oura’s retention at one year is “better than Netflix or Spotify” and “way better than Netflix or Spotify” at three years. He says users are incentivized to wear the ring for longer to unlock a deeper understanding of their health.
“What’s interesting about that to me is that as you’re putting data into the system and the system’s getting smarter about you, and maybe your health condition is changing — you’re going through a life transition like pregnancy, or you’re starting to maybe realize you’re not immortal,” he says. “With all these things, all of a sudden that data starts to take on another dimension of value and meaning to you, and you don’t want to give it up. You’re like, ‘I have five years of data. I have 10 years of data. I don’t want that value to go away.’”
Oura’s vast amount of data collection is as much its friend as its foe — the ‘always-on’ nature of AI-powered wearables raises significant privacy concerns, and consumers are aware of these risks. Several surveys show that consumers’ main barriers to wearables adoption are fears around how tech companies may handle their sensitive data. According to a recent YouGov survey, nearly half (48%) of UK adults express concern that data collected from their devices could be used by companies to learn about their lifestyles. For women whose employers provide Oura rings through one of the tech firm’s enterprise plans, privacy concerns over data sharing can be particularly high. Oura is also working with insurance companies like Essence Healthcare, which provides medicare for retirees in the US and with whom it launched a pilot in January to give everyone in its program an Oura device for tracking wearer health data over time.
Founded in Finland, Oura is governed under European GDPR data law. The majority of its customers are in the US, however, where Oura is governed under the Health Information Privacy and Portability Act.
When asked if Oura will ever share the identities behind individual customer data with employers or insurers, Hale says the decision is in the hands of the wearer.
“In terms of how data is handled, you have to be very careful about that,” Hale says. “One of the things that we believe is that we service the patient. We don’t service the employer. We don’t service the insurance company. We service the person who’s wearing the device, our customer. We will probably never tell your employer that you got pregnant. We’ll probably tell nobody, because that’s not information for us to share. That’s your information to share — you decide.”
But at the same time, Hale sketches out a clear vision for Oura’s future that relies on institutions tapping the tech company for deeper insights into population metrics.
“The economics at the system level pencil out our strategy. We’re working with insurers. If you could get a lower insurance rate, would you share your information to get that? Maybe, it’s up to you. If your employer provided an incentive, would you want them to know your health status? Maybe, maybe not. It’s up to you.”
Hale says that in Oura’s vision for a “world of transparency and understanding”, a HR professional could track whether a company’s employee population is becoming less or more healthy, or moving more or less.
“That’s much more powerful than what they currently know, which is just how many sick days you’re having,” Hale says. “So that notion of privacy is so central, but the systems are moving and evolving in a direction where that information is powerful and it can make and save money and make you have better health outcomes. It can change behaviors on a massive scale. These are all things that are tangible; they’re within reach.”
