Oura Is Filing to Go Public. The Real Asset Is Your Heart Rate Data.

Oura filed its confidential registration with the SEC on Thursday. The document, known as an S-1, is the form companies submit when they want to sell shares to the public — and when Oura's becomes public, it will show exactly what the company is really selling.

The smart ring that tracks sleep, heart rate, fertility windows, and stress has been adopted by five million paying members who wear it nightly. But the rings are just sensors. What Oura has built over a decade is a continuous stream of intimate biological data flowing from those five million people into the company's servers, where AI models generate sleep scores, readiness scores, fertility predictions, and stress assessments. The ring is the delivery mechanism. The data is the product.

That is the question Oura is asking public investors to answer. The company, which started in Finland and now operates from San Francisco, filed to go public alongside SpaceX and OpenAI in what investment banks are calling the 2026 IPO wave. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Allen & Co., and Jefferies are managing the offering [Bloomberg]. Oura declined to specify a price range or share count. Both will come later, once the SEC review concludes.

As of this quarter, Oura is on track to surpass five million paid members, a fourfold increase over two years [CNBC]. Revenue in 2025 hit $1 billion, doubling from $500 million the year prior, according to Sacra [Sacra]. CEO Tom Hale told investors in September the company is on track for $1.5 billion in 2026 revenue — triple its 2024 sales — though he has also said the number could approach $2 billion [CNBC]. That $500 million spread is not nothing. The $11 billion valuation was set in October when Oura raised $900 million from Fidelity, Iconiq, and Whale Rock [CNBC]. Category shipments jumped 49% in 2025, per IDC data reported by Bloomberg. Whoop raised $575 million at a $10.1 billion valuation in March. The category is hot.

Oura also signed a $96 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense in October 2024 to provide rings tracking servicemember health [Front Office Sports]. The company is building a facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Its head of business development as of last fall is a former Pentagon procurement official. The defense angle is real — and it is now context, not lede.

Once the S-1 is public, analysts will scrutinize what Oura actually owns. The ring is the sensor. The data is the product. Five million people wearing the ring every night have, without most of them fully appreciating it, built Oura into a biometric data company that happens to sell hardware.

This is not a novel business model. 23andMe built the same structure on genetic data and ran it into bankruptcy, at which point the question of what happened to the genetic data of its 15 million users became a live regulatory nightmare. The parallel is not exact — Oura is not a medical device, its data practices are not HIPAA-regulated the way hospital data is, and it has not imploded. But the structural question is identical: what are the obligations of a company that holds continuous, intimate biological records on millions of people, and what happens to those records when the company gets acquired or wound down or its governance changes?

The revenue mix will be the first test. Roughly 80% hardware, 20% subscription, per Sacra [Sacra]. That is a hardware company today. The question for investors is whether the future is a data services company with better margins — predictive health insights sold to insurers, employers, healthcare systems, and defense agencies. Oura has 1,200 partners across wellness and medicine. Its AI advisor feature, launched inside the app, answers health questions using personal data. Sixty percent of users in internal surveys said it helped them understand their metrics better. The infrastructure for a data services business exists.

In January, Bloomberg reported Oura was planning a tender offer for existing investors at roughly a 25% discount to the Series E price [Bloomberg]. Insiders wanted out before the public markets could reprice the company. The discount was not large. But it was a signal.

Oura did not respond to questions by publication time.

The IPO pipeline this year includes SpaceX, which filed its own confidential prospectus on Wednesday, and OpenAI, which sources say filed confidentially this week. Both are AI companies in the broad sense. Oura is, among other things, an AI health company — one whose AI models have been trained on a decade of continuous biometric data from people wearing a ring to sleep. That is a different kind of AI asset than a language model. It is harder to replicate, more personal, and closer to the body.

Whether public markets price that asset at $11 billion [CNBC], more, or less will tell us something about how the finance world thinks about the value of human biology when it is continuously measured. The ring is just the beginning of that story.