When the global investment community’s focus is still on next-generation AI glasses, smartwatches, and other hot hardware categories, a Finnish company born 12 years ago is dominating the AI-native hardware track with an seemingly unremarkable product. Its “weapon” is not bulky equipment, but a smart ring that weighs only 4-6 grams and has a band width of less than 1 centimeter. This once-niche category is now, under the leadership of Oura, sweeping a new wave in the wearable market.
Recently, in the men-dominated smart wearable market, Oura has undeniably become the “golden king.” This company focused on smart ring development is advancing a new round of E-series funding, amounting to $875 million. This funding has successfully pushed Oura’s valuation into the “billion-dollar club,” reaching $10.9 billion (Around $77.7 billion), more than double the $5 billion from the D-series funding in November last year. Benefiting from the surge in global smart wearable market demand, this funding is not only the largest Oura has raised since its inception, but according to insiders, the final amount may even exceed $900 million as the deal is not yet fully closed.
The pursuit of Oura by the capital market goes far beyond this. The company said that in early September this year, it has secured a $250 million revolving credit facility from a syndicate of banks including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Barclays. Facing such intense market attention, Oura CEO Tom Hale recently stated in an interview that Oura’s growth “is like a rocket,” adding that in his 130-quarter business career, “he has never seen such a strong quarterly performance.”
Time goes back to 2013, when Oura’s story officially began in Oulu, Finland. Initially, the company was named “Jouzen,” derived from the Finnish word “joutsen,” meaning the national bird of Finland, the swan, and was only renamed to “Oura” before the product launch. Its founding team consists of Petteri Lahtela, Kari Kivelä, and Markku Koskela, all of whom had deep roots in Oulu’s vibrant tech industry, working for well-known companies like Polar and Nokia, accumulating extensive experience in product design and engineering research and development.
The founders keenly noticed the lack of tools in the market that could effectively measure sleep quality and physical recovery status. “So far, there hasn’t been a simple and convenient method to understand how your body recovers from daily life challenges,” said Petri Laxman, co-founder. “That’s why we created Oura.”
Like many startups, Oura’s early journey was full of hardships. In the early days, lacking user data, employees proactively used their own health data to test product features. During tight cash flow, salaries were often delayed by months. “We relied on using personal credit cards to make ends meet, but everyone showed up to work on time every day, because we all firmly believed in taking the Oura Ring to the world,” recalled an early employee. In terms of funding, Oura also faced difficulties, taking its first $2.3 million investment only after its establishment in 2013 until the end of 2015.
After two years of development, the first-generation Oura Ring (Gen1) was officially launched in 2015, primarily for market concept validation. In the same year, in August, Oura launched a fundraising campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, reaching its $100,000 goal in just 15 hours. By the end of the 37-day crowdfunding period, it had raised a total of $650,000, far exceeding expectations. Even more impressive was that Stanford University purchased two Oura Rings from the platform. After research, they found that it was the most accurate wearable device at the time for measuring sleep quality and sleep stages. In March 2017, this research, which even the Oura team was unaware of, was published externally, bringing the brand significant positive attention.
Building on the momentum, in November 2017, the second-generation Oura Ring (Gen2) made its debut at the Slush tech conference in Finland and was officially put into production and sold in 2018, with sales rapidly soaring to nearly 10,000 units. Also in 2018, Oura’s employee base expanded to about 50 people, expanded its business to the United States, and established a more standardized management team. With the addition of professionals in marketing, sales, and product development, Oura’s global influence gradually increased. As of August 2019, consumers in over 100 countries had purchased more than 100,000 Gen2 smart rings in total.
In 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly became a “accelerator” for Oura’s development. The temperature monitoring function of its rings was used for early COVID-19 screening, leading to explosive sales growth. This momentum directly drove the funding process, and in May 2021, Oura successfully completed a $100 million Series C funding, officially entering its peak development phase. With precise monitoring data and an outstanding user experience, Oura Ring began to gain favor in the U.S. sports world, with athletes from leagues such as the NBA (basketball), UFC (martial arts), and NASCAR (auto racing) becoming its users. Celebrities like Musk, Zuckerberg, and the British Prince Harry also showed strong interest in it.
After 2020, Oura further expanded its customer base by targeting the enterprise market and launching its first enterprise product, “Health Risk Management.” Today, its enterprise clients include hospital systems, banks, Las Vegas Sands Group, as well as sports leagues and teams like the NBA, WNBA, and the Aston Martin Red Bull Racing Team. According to company internal data, since 2015, Oura Ring has sold a cumulative 5.5 million units, with 3 million sold in just the last year alone, achieving annual revenue exceeding $500 million, and projected to reach $1 billion by 2025.
In the native hardware AI field, Oura has always adhered to the philosophy of “hardware-first, AI-assisted.” Unlike many hardware products on the market that merely use AI as a gimmick, the core competitiveness of Oura Ring stems first from its robust hardware quality. The latest generation product, Oura Ring 4, released last year, not only features built-in sensors that sustainably and accurately monitor various vital signs but also upgrades its exclusive Smart Sensing technology—a complete technology platform that works in tandem with algorithms and sensors. Among them, the signal pathway has increased from 8 in Gen3 to 18, meaning the ring can capture body signals from more angles and automatically select the optimal signal path, ensuring the continuity and accuracy of the data.
On the software side, Oura launched the AI-driven Oura Advisor feature last year, providing users with personalized health guidance and insights to help them achieve their health goals. It not only deeply interprets the health data collected by the hardware but also analyzes the long-term trends and patterns behind the data, proactively alerting users and conducting correlation analysis. Today, Oura’s products have evolved from initially focusing on sleep monitoring to becoming an AI-native health platform that integrates functions such as heart rate, blood oxygen, body temperature, stress monitoring, and menstrual cycle prediction.
At the beginning of this year, Oura achieved a milestone breakthrough — obtaining the FDA “Medical Device Certification” in the United States, which means its data and analytics have reached medical-grade standards, significantly elevating the company’s development ceiling. To build a more comprehensive medical ecosystem, Oura has successively acquired data analysis companies Veri and Sparta Science, and has formed a strategic partnership with Dexcom, a giant in continuous glucose monitoring, to jointly develop chronic disease management solutions for diabetes.
In terms of business model, Oura pioneered an innovative approach of “hardware sales + subscription services.” The price of its ring is approximately 399 euros, and to fully unlock the app’s features, users need to pay a monthly subscription fee of 5.99 euros. Currently, subscription service revenue accounts for 20% of Oura’s total revenue. It’s worth noting that the U.S. Department of Defense is its largest institutional client, having distributed tens of thousands of rings to military personnel for tracking fatigue levels. However, Oura’s CEO emphasized that this contract accounts for only a small portion of the company’s global revenue. Additionally, NASA is also using the Oura Ring to monitor astronauts’ health in extreme space environments.
Regarding the use of this E-round funding, Oura has outlined three key directions: first, developing “non-invasive blood glucose trend monitoring” technology; second, hiring more medical data scientists to develop health models for specific populations, such as the “elderly health monitoring model” and the “pregnant woman health management model”; third, focusing on expanding the Asian market, with China, Japan, and India becoming its core target regions for the next phase of growth. In the AI-native hardware track, Oura is writing its own business legend with a tiny smart ring.
