Background: Oura was founded in 2013 and is best known for the Oura Ring - a health-tracking smart ring that monitors everything from sleep and stress to recovery and metabolic health. The company has built a community of more than five million paid members and has positioned itself as a premium player in the growing wearable health market.

What happened: Oura has now confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the US regulator, marking the first formal step toward a public listing. And the company was last valued at $11 billion USD after raising a $900 million Series E round in October.

What else: Oura's revenue quadrupled in just two fiscal years, while management expects sales to approach $2 billion USD in 2026. And it's positioning itself to look less like a wearable technology company... and more like a subscription business packaged as jewellery.  

What's the key learning?

💡 Hardware gets you in the door, but subscriptions keep the lights on. Oura follows the classic "razor and blades" model, where the ring attracts customers, but the ongoing membership is where the real money is made.  

💡 Having this recurring revenue is highly attractive to investors because it creates more predictable earnings than one-off product sales. Oura users now pay monthly to unlock AI-powered insights and analytics, making the business less dependent on customers buying a new ring every few years.  

💡 Oura moved to a subscription model in 2023, charging new users $5.99 pet month on top of the device cost. Despite initial backlash, it worked. Paid memberships have since grown from roughly 1.25 million to over 5 million in just two years.  

Turns out convincing people to obsess over their health data... and then charging them monthly to actually see it, is a pretty appealing business model.