#75: OURA RING IPO — A Wall Street Proposal + Anthropic IPO DELAYED and the Westinghouse IPO

Craig Stevens (0:00)

Oura, the smart ring maker, empowering users to live healthier and longer, has filed for an IPO. We'll look at S1 highlights. We just learned the Anthropic IPO timeline is delayed by a month. We're now expecting a late October IPO date. In IPO radar news, Nscale's contracted revenue doubles in a week, while Perplexity and Cognition see their valuations surge. And Aryen's watching at Westinghouse IPO. Welcome to the Access IPOs Podcast, where we explore opportunities to invest in the world's most innovative and disruptive pre-IPO companies. I'm Craig Stevens, founder of Access IPOs, and my Pittsburgh accent's a little bit rusty, but I'll be talking about Westinghouse later in the show. I want to start first with Anthropic. The Anthropic IPO timeline has shifted by about a month. We're now expecting a late October IPO date. We got a late Friday report from Echo Wang at Reuters. The article says, Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its IPO in mid-October at the earliest, completing the listing days before the US midterm elections in November. It was supposed to drop their S1 filing early next week after Labor Day. I was expecting it on Tuesday. Now that S1 filing isn't expected to drop until late September. This article mentions the $15 billion revolving credit facility that was reported by Bloomberg earlier in the week. And CNBC suggests that this might be part of the reason why this has been delayed. So disappointing to see a delay. It's always disappointing when these deals get delayed, but they're always subject to change. And this is a big, complicated IPO. So I guess it's no surprise. But that midterm election deadline is going to become a really hard deadline for them very soon. So we'll be watching for that filing to drop that last week of September. That was the week that they were supposed to IPO timeline shifting by about a month. Demand signals seem high for this one. I'm seeing a lot of optimism from venture capital investors, institutional investors, and there's a lot of pent up demand for these shares because there's been such high demand in the private markets. It's been very challenging for not just individual investors, but institutional investors to acquire shares or SPV shares of Anthropic over the last couple of years now. And so all these people who have been wanting to own Anthropic shares for the past few years are going to want to participate in this IPO. It's their first opportunity to invest it. I think people just want to own shares for the long term, even if the valuation doubles from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in a few months. Talked about that extensively last week. Last I've seen is the valuation is around $1.5 trillion. I got that estimate from CapLight, and CapLight aggregates a lot of secondary market trades to come up with that data. So we're hoping to see the IPO filing come out closer to that $1.5 trillion valuation. But as I've talked about in previous weeks, existing investors think this thing is worth $2 trillion to $3 trillion, but we won't be able to estimate the valuation of the deal until it updates terms and starts the roadshow. We'll digest the financials, we'll read about the total addressable market, and perhaps there'll be some projections in there, and certainly some risks that we'll be paying attention to. All that's going to be important, but the real number most of us are looking for is what is going to be that IPO valuation, and we'll be able to calculate that or calculate an estimate of that number when we get the updated terms. So we're always cautious heading into any IPO, and especially these big overhyped IPOs, but Anthropic is driving revenue. They're growing quickly, they're projecting much higher revenue in just a few years. But I expect demand to be very high, both from retail and institutional, and then hopefully in that filing, we'll get a sense of how much access retail investors are going to get. We haven't heard any news leaks like we did for SpaceX, but we're hoping for that 20 to 30% of allocations going to retail investors. But if institutional demand is as high as we think it could be, then retail investors need to prepare to be disappointed for this deal. There should be a lot of shares to go around, but it's really up to the issuer, Anthropic, to decide whether or not retail investors are going to be left empty handed. We had a fresh new filing this week. Before we get into that, a quick word from our sponsor. Support for the show comes from VCX, the public ticker for private tech. For generations, American companies have moved the world forward through their ingenuity and determination. And for generations, everyday Americans could be part of that journey through perhaps the greatest innovation of all, the US stock market. But now that's changed. Today, our most innovative companies are staying private rather than going public. The result is that everyday Americans are excluded from investing and getting left further behind while a select few reap all the benefits. Until now. Introducing VCX, the public ticker for private tech. Now available wherever you buy stocks. VCX by Fundrise gives everyone the opportunity to invest in the next generation of innovation, including the companies leading the AI revolution, space exploration, defense tech and more. Visit getvcx.com for more info. That's getvcx.com. An investment in the fund is speculative and involves substantial risks, including possible loss of the entire investment. Carefully consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses before investing. The fund's SEC filings, including any current prospectus in the fund's annual and semi-annual reports are available at getvcx.com. Review them carefully before investing. This is a paid sponsorship, The Host is Long VCX. Thanks to our sponsor for supporting the show. We had two brand new filings this week. Both of these companies were on my mid-year list of upcoming IPOs. I'm going to focus on Oura today because that's the consumer name that most people know. It's a little easier to understand than the other name. But I want to briefly touch on SB Energy because this is potentially going to be a $50 million IPO. SB stands for SoftBank. So this is a SoftBank business. They own it alongside OpenAI as an investor, Nvidia as an investor. This company started as a solar and battery storage company, but it's quickly moving into AI data centers. And that's why it's brought on OpenAI as investors, and Nvidia has these long-term commitments from OpenAI through the Stargate program. That's a domestic US investment of up to I think $500 billion to invest in US infrastructure data centers and computing for AI. So at potentially $50 billion, that's as large as the Medline IPO that was last year's biggest IPO. So it's really something we need to be paying attention to, except that it's not that interesting of a business, just another one of these data center companies. But one of the key takeaways from the filing is that revenue is at about $139 million for the latest reporting period and a $3.2 billion loss. So if you're investing in this deal, you're going to be putting a lot of faith in the management to be able to invest in these data centers and power installations as it incurs these gigantic losses. This one actually reminds me a bit of Fermi. If you remember that IPO from, I believe, late last year, Fermi had zero revenue, but it had a big plot of land. It had some key managers and investors building out a power complex, an AI data center complex in Texas. But without any revenue and a lot of money going out the door, investors became skeptical very quickly. So, Fermi opened up positively for the IPO, but it fell just a few months later, and it's been a terrible investment if anybody was holding on to that one for long term. So I compare SB Energy a little bit to Fermi, although they're still very different stories. But as this one's coming down the line, if you're thinking about investing in the IPO or longer term, you're going to think about how is Wall Street going to view these long term expectations in the quarter to quarter reporting, because watching that much money go out the door is only acceptable for so long. So SB Energy is a very real and legitimate AI infrastructure investment, but it carries significant risk at this point. That takes me to Oura. Oura is a Finland based company. It has offices in San Francisco as well. It makes the Oura Smart Ring, which collects biometric data in a way that's less intrusive than a watch. I wear an Apple watch. A lot of us do. The Oura Ring is a little more comfortable, I think, when you're sleeping and possibly for other activities. We knew this was coming going back to about March. There was a story that broke out of the information when Katie Roof was still there, along with Julia Hornstein, and they told us that Oura was talking to banks about a potential IPO. But we actually got some hints about this one back in October of 2025 It raised about 900 million at an $11 billion valuation, and the lead investor on that deal was Fidelity. And when we see Fidelity enter as a late stage investor, a lot of times that means this company is trying to bridge itself into the public markets, and that looks like what's happened here. They filed confidentially for an IPO on May 21st, and the filing dropped this Thursday night, September 3rd. I'm sharing my screen now. We're going to walk through some of the highlights of the S1 filing. First thing I noticed, this is an S1 filing and not an F1 filing. Usually foreign companies file with an F1 filing, so I guess they've done what they need to do to get it based in the United States. They're calling it just Oura Inc instead of Oura Health or Oura Ring. And taking a look at the underwriters, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, the big three that we see on so many IPOs, Allen & Company, and Jeffreys. And there's a handful of other names of underwriters and book runners, but one of the key names that we see here is at the bottom, and that's Robinhood. We know Robinhood qualified themselves to be underwriters in these deals, and by doing so, gives them an advantage, I think, in acquiring shares to allocate to their customers. Robinhood is also an investor in Oura through RVI. That's a fund that I own and I think a lot of viewers own. That's a closed-end, traded fund, symbol RVI, that holds a stake in Oura, and it's about 3.6% of the fund, as I look at that today. With Robinhood being here as a listed underwriter, there's a very good chance that Robinhood customers are going to get an opportunity to request and receive shares during this IPO. And also, since Fidelity took part in that late stage round, I expect to see Fidelity offering shares to this deal as well. There's no other mentions in this filing about other brokers that are going to be offering IPO access, and that's pretty normal. Most of the time they don't do that. Although in SpaceX's case, they did list them out, and those were the only brokers that got shares. We could expect to see several different brokers with IPO access to this deal. We learned within the last month or so that they plan to not only raise capital, but also some existing shareholders are going to sell shares into this IPO. So that's going to increase the size of the pool, making more shares available for IPO investors. And we don't know what percentage will go to retail, but presumably some of the shares will go to retail. And we always like to see a higher percentage going to retail. SpaceX was about 20 to 25%.