Why Oura Put Its IPO on Pause

Imani Moise (0:05)

I'm not a wearable tech person, but there are plenty of options out there if you want to put on a mini computer that can spit out all sorts of data about your health. There's the ones that go on your wrist, like Fitbits and Apple Watches. And then, there are those sleek metal rings made by the company Oura.

Can you give us a sense of how popular this ring is? Do you know anyone with it?

David Wainer (0:29)

Oh my god, yeah, you see it everywhere, right?

Imani Moise (0:31)

That's our colleague David Wainer.

David Wainer (0:33)

I'm sure you've seen people wearing it. It's living in sort of like an affluent metropolitan areas. You just see it everywhere. It's super popular.

Imani Moise (0:43)

Lots of celebrities flaunt their Oura rings, like Jennifer Aniston.

David Wainer (0:47)

You turned me on to this thing called the Oura ring. Right, the ring that measures your sleep and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_3 (0:52)

Correct, which is on my finger.

David Wainer (0:54)

Gwyneth Paltrow is one of them, right? She's talked very highly about wearing the ring.

Imani Moise (0:59)

There we go, guys.

SPEAKER_4 (1:01)

It's time for me to get in bed.

Imani Moise (1:03)

One common refrain among wearers of the ring, they love that sleep tracking feature.

David Wainer (1:09)

It's like the trendy thing to do. People in Silicon Valley and Wall Street are certainly wearing it.

It's certainly associated with cool. It's something that people brag about. Hey, my sleep score was incredible on my Oura last night. So, yeah, I see them everywhere. I know a lot of people who wear the ring. People are quite content with the ring.

Imani Moise (1:34)

Oura was founded in Finland and it's still a private start-up with just over a billion dollars in sales. But it punches above its weight. By sales volume in the US, Oura trails only tech giants Apple and Google in the wearables market. Until just a few weeks ago, Oura was planning to go public with hopes for a huge windfall of cash.

And it seemed like good timing. Compared to 2025, the cash generated in IPOs this year is up 400 percent. But for Oura, things didn't go according to plan, and the company halted its bid.

David Wainer (2:09)

It's just a paradox, right? Where you have this high-flying, fast-growing ring that's super glitzy and cool, and at the same time, it tries to IPO and it doesn't go so well.

Imani Moise (2:20)

But there's different levels of, call it flaking here, right? So like, you could ring check dinner plans with your friends, that's kind of low stakes, or you can postpone a wedding, which is very high stakes. So is what Oura did more akin to canceling dinner plans or canceling a wedding?

David Wainer (2:38)

It's definitely more akin to canceling a wedding, for sure.

Imani Moise (2:45)

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Imani Moise, it's Tuesday, October 13th.

Coming up on the show, Oura is everywhere. So why didn't Wall Street put a ring on it?

SPEAKER_5 (3:14)

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