Analysis
Oura's IPO paperwork, filed publicly on September 3, showed revenue of about $1.21 billion for the nine months ended June 30 -- nearly double the prior period -- with 3.6 million rings sold over the past year and roughly 5 million paid members. Pulse covered the filing itself when it landed. What TechCrunch added this week is the competitive picture Oura will have to defend as a public company.
The challengers, and what each is actually selling:
- Ultrahuman -- raised $70 million with backing from Qualcomm Ventures; its Ring Pro sells for $479 and runs software directly on the device to support on-ring AI features. US shipping begins mid-September after resolving a patent dispute with Oura.
- RingConn -- Gen 3 launched in May 2026 at $349, competing on vascular health analysis derived from existing sensors rather than new hardware.
- Circular -- Ring 3 series arriving with NFC contactless payments and haptics; the Pro model carries FDA-cleared ECG for atrial fibrillation detection plus blood pressure tracking.
- Samsung -- Galaxy Ring at $399, shipping since 2024 and the most basic of the group, lacking sleep apnea and AFib detection, but attached to the Galaxy ecosystem and its retail distribution.
- Dreame -- a newer entrant showing a ring with touchpad controls and haptic alerts; pricing not announced.
“- RingConn -- Gen 3 launched in May 2026 at $349, competing on vascular health analysis derived from existing sensors rather than new hardware.”
Oura, founded in Oulu, Finland in 2013, effectively created this category and has held it through three hardware generations and a subscription model that most competitors have copied or explicitly rejected. The subscription is the crux of the public-market story: hardware margin is cyclical and competitive, recurring revenue is what earns a software multiple, and Oura's roughly 5 million paid members is the number underwriters will lean on.
The threat is not any single rival's specs. It is that ring hardware is converging -- the sensors, the battery chemistry and the contract manufacturers are largely shared -- while clinical claims are becoming the differentiator. Circular's FDA-cleared ECG is the kind of feature that shifts the comparison from wellness to medical device, a regime where Apple has spent years and enormous resources and where Oura has moved more cautiously.
The other pressure is Apple itself. A rumored Apple ring has hovered over this category for years without materializing, and Apple's dominance in wrist wearables means any entry resets the competitive set instantly. Public investors will price that overhang whether or not it happens.
The useful comparison for the offering is Whoop, which stayed private, and Peloton, which showed what happens when hardware growth normalizes and a subscription base has to carry the valuation alone. Oura is entering public markets with better unit economics than either, and with the same structural question: what does revenue growth look like in year two after the pandemic-era hardware boom fully anniversaries?
Distribution is the underrated variable. Oura sells direct and through Best Buy, Amazon and Target, and has pushed hard into employer and payer channels where a ring is reimbursed rather than bought -- the same channel that carried Whoop's business and that Samsung cannot easily match with carrier retail. Those contracts are stickier than consumer demand and are the reason the membership number has grown faster than unit sales in recent periods.
The metric to watch after listing is subscription attach rate on new rings sold. Hardware volume can be bought with discounts; attach rate cannot.
