Smart Ring Maker Oura, Backers Seek $2.2B in US IPO

I believe OURA is living on borrowed time and only exists because Apple hasn't yet entered the smart ring market. It's a repeat of the Fitbit situation. Before the Apple Watch launched in 2015, Fitbit had 30% of the wearables market. Then the Apple came in, and Fitbit started bleeding users: high end ones to the Apple Watch, and low end ones to cheap Chinese competition. Fitbit eventually collapsed and got sold in a fire sale to Google.

Apple is already rumored to be working on their own smart ring. Samsung is already in the market. This is one reason why Oura is in a rush to IPO, they need liquidity for early investors + cash to compete before Apple comes in and takes a huge slice of their market.

I just can't see how a smart ring company is worth 14b, or how they need 2b. This seems insane to me.

I used an Oura Ring most of last year. The hardware was very nice, but man that app is a dumpster fire and you can't use the ring without it or the subscription. What a shame.

The advice it gives is like shaking a magic 8-ball. It flags all exercise as "high physiological stress". It's somehow worse at tagging the activity than the rock bottom cheapest smartwatches. The blood oxygen is incorrect half the time and riddled with artifacts. It fails to detect naps and the first and last hours of sleep, so it insists you're in terrible shape with high sleep debt.

Yes, I had the correct size ring and even tried jamming a spacer in there to get it even tighter than it already was. Also tried other fingers, etc. The only solution that worked was to wipe all data every once in a while so that the stats wouldn't drift so much.