Smart ring maker Oura is preparing for a US IPO, with a fundraising target of up to $30 billion. Bloomberg reported on August 24, citing sources familiar with the matter, that the listing could happen as early as September, with a valuation of over $160 billion.
A reference point is less than a year ago: in September last year, Oura completed an $875 million Series E financing, valuing the company at around $10.9 billion. In less than a year, it has increased by about 47%.
The underwriting team is well-structured: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Allen & Co., and Jefferies. The company had already secretly filed documents in May this year. Oura has not immediately responded to requests for comments.
How is this price justified?
It relies on a rather steep growth curve.
In terms of sales, as of June 2024, Oura had sold a cumulative 2.5 million rings; by September 2025, this number was 5.5 million—according to CEO Tom Hale at the time.
Income is more straightforward: $500 million in 2024, with the company expecting to reach $1.5 billion in 2026. Tripled in two years.
The product logic also makes sense. The wearable device market is dominated by smartwatches, with rings accounting for a small but rapidly growing portion. Its selling point is so simple it's almost cunning: wanting to know how well you sleep, how well you recover, without wearing a watch on your wrist when you sleep.
Oura is also expanding its reach. Its earliest users were the "biohacker" CEOs of Silicon Valley, and now they are turning themselves into a mainstream sleep and recovery brand. Its most direct competitor, Whoop, is taking the same path—shifting from serving elite athletes and young men to a broader audience, adding hormone tracking, perimenopausal support, and thyroid-related blood test offerings in the past year, with a March valuation of $10 billion.
The big players are also at the doorstep. Samsung launched the Galaxy Ring two years ago, and Apple is working on a series of AI-driven wearable devices.
It Was Sued Last Week
On August 20, the Clarkson law firm in San Francisco filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that Oura had misled consumers about the accuracy of its sleep tracking.
The wording of the complaint was harsh. It alleged that the Oura ring could not measure or assess sleep quality, determine any physiological signals required for sleep stage classification, and actually relied on AI-generated estimates, with these estimates having "about the same probability of being correct as flipping a coin."
The harshest sentence in the complaint is about the marketing message: Oura sells a ring starting at $300, but advertises that it can see things only seen in a hospital sleep lab, including the four sleep stages—"Oura not only claims to measure heart rate or body temperature, but claims to determine exactly which sleep stage the wearer is in at any given moment, something that in reality requires electrodes on the scalp and sensors on the eyes."
This is not a sudden accusation. For years, Oura users have been complaining online that the sleep data is inaccurate. Some have said that they felt terrible, but the ring told them their sleep was "ideal."
Oura's response is twofold: first, acknowledging the boundaries—The Oura ring is not a medical device and cannot replace a clinical sleep study; second, denying the conclusion—the company states that its sleep staging has been compared to polysomnography (the gold standard for determining sleep stages) in multiple studies and has performed well, with multiple third-party independent studies supporting its accuracy claims. The company has also consistently disclosed the mechanisms and metrics underlying its sleep staging. The company has stated that it will defend itself in the appropriate legal forums.
For a company about to be valued at $16 billion, the position of this lawsuit is delicate. It is not about the functionality of a specific feature, but about whether the core promise this company has been selling for ten years—“I know how you slept last night”—actually holds up.
Clearly, it knows this Achilles' heel
Just look at its last few moves before going public.
On August 20, Oura created two new executive positions that did not exist before: the inaugural Chief Information Officer, Sanjay Chandra, and the inaugural Senior Vice President of AI and Software Engineering, Han Chiu. Apart from driving AI health insights and foundational data infrastructure, Tom Hale gave another reason that is worth pondering—"Enhancing the company's credibility in front of mature healthcare players."
The phrase "mature healthcare players" points to where Oura really wants to go: integrating wearable data into the mainstream healthcare system. Apple, Google, and Samsung are all vying for this path. And to take this path, the accuracy of your data is no longer in the realm of consumer complaints but in the realm of regulation and clinical oversight.
It is also drawing a line in a different way: Oura has already filed patent infringement lawsuits against seven competitors.
Why now?
Because the window is open.
Oura is set to join a wave of companies going public ahead of the mid-term elections in November. Anthropic is expected to debut as early as next month with a potential valuation that could rival or even surpass SpaceX's record-breaking IPO; AI cloud company Nscale is aiming to raise up to $3 billion as soon as September; Switch has secretly filed and could go public as soon as November with a valuation approaching $50 billion.
One detail worth highlighting separately: according to Bloomberg, existing investors are expected to sell a significant portion of their shares in this offering.
Oura has quite a list of shareholders—Series E backers Fidelity, ICONIQ, Whale Rock, Atreides, earlier investors Dexcom, The Chernin Group, Forerunner Ventures, Coatue, and Temasek. Some of these funds have been waiting patiently for many years.
A company founded in 2013, now with over 900 employees, choosing to go public at a time when revenue is nearing $1.5 billion, lawsuits are looming, and Big Tech is under scrutiny, seeking to raise $3 billion, and selling a promise that still needs to be proven.
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