Smart Ring Maker Oura Doubles Valuation to $5.2 billion

One ring to rule them all… at least, Oura hopes so, if not quite in the Tolkien sense.

Where once the wearables market was totally dominated by oddly pushy smart watches telling you to get up and exercise more, now there’s a new garment hitting the scene. Smart rings are starting to pick up momentum as a product category, and industry leader Oura drove that point home on Thursday when it announced it had completed a new $200 million funding round, taking its valuation to $5.2 billion, up from $2.6 billion in 2022. 

Rings of Power

The smart ring market is still something of a minnow in the consumer healthtech pond, but at least one big tech player in the wearables space is taking notice of Oura’s success as Samsung released its own smart ring in July of this year.

Much like smart watches, smart rings track by-now familiar biometrics like your heart rate, workouts, and sleep patterns. Finland-based Oura is a private company, so we can’t take a forensic look at its term sheet, but the company said in a statement that it’s in rude financial health: 

• Oura said it’s managed to double its revenue over the past year, partly through ring sales and partly through the $5.99-per-month subscriptions it offers to customers to let them use its bio-analytics. Rings as a service: Sauron never thought of that one.
• CEO of Oura Tom Hale also seems bullish that the company won’t get squeezed out by the Big Tech company most associated with high-status wearables, as he told CNBC last month that he doesn’t think Apple will produce a smart ring. “I think they [Apple] are unconvinced about the value of having a ring and a watch together and they’re not interested in undercutting the Apple Watch as a business,” Hale said.

Patently Untrue: In August, Patent Drop reported that Apple did in fact submit a patent application for a smart ring device that would be able to track a host of biometrics. That could be a sign that the iPhone and Apple Watch giant is eyeing up a ring of its own, but Big Tech companies are also famous for filing patents that never see the light of day, simply to block off competitors from the newest, shiniest tech.