Dorothy Kilroy has seen her company’s smart rings on some very famous fingers. Mark Zuckerberg also wears it. So is Jack Dorsey. Prince Harry too. But when Oura’s chief commercial officer sat down with this editor at the Elevate conference in Toronto last week, she surprised me by saying that the company’s fastest-growing user base isn’t tech billionaires or health-obsessed executives. These are women in their early 20s.
It highlights how interesting a moment this is for Oura. The 13-year-old Finnish healthtech company essentially invented the smart ring category and turned it into a billion-dollar business. But it’s now crowded with competitors, including Samsung with its Galaxy Ring, Ultrahuman with its subscription-free pitch, and Hoop with its mysterious athletic performance. Each promises to take Oura’s lead.
The question isn’t whether Oura, which has 80% of the smart ring market, is winning now. clearly winning. The question is whether it can maintain its lead as the wearables market fragments across demographics and use cases, and whether Oura needs to embrace all demographics to succeed.
Kilroy spent eight years at Airbnb before joining Oura three years ago, and saw both companies similarly expand through word of mouth. At Airbnb, she suggested, 90% of the company’s revenue is tied directly to people vacationing. In Oura, people are raving about their sleep scores.
That organic enthusiasm is especially strong among so-called corporate athletes and high-achieving professionals looking to optimize their health and stay sharp. These are people who realize that running on fumes isn’t actually a sustainable career strategy, or, as Kilroy explained on stage, “people who are trying to be the best at their game. They want to make sure they regulate their sleep. They want to know how to exercise. They want to take care of their metabolic health.”
Millennials and Gen The company announced that its sales doubled last year and are expected to double this year as well. What’s even more impressive is that Oura’s 12-month retention rate is in the high 80s, compared to other wearables that languish in the low 30s, Kilroy said. In fact, people keep wearing it.
However, a new wrinkle has appeared. Oura has captured the professional crowd, but younger consumers, particularly young men obsessed with profit and recovery, are drawn elsewhere. For example, Whoop fitness bands seem to have become the unofficial uniform of serious athletes and gym buddies.
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A few weeks ago, the competition got a little more intense. Whoop, founded 13 years ago in Boston, announced its new blood testing service the day before Oura announced its own blood testing partnership with Quest Diagnostics. When asked about the timing, Kilroy instead focused on the value Oura brings to members. But the near-simultaneous developments suggest both companies are looking at the same future of integrating wearable data with real-world clinical biomarkers.
Then there’s Ultrahuman, playing the sleazy loser. At $349 (often $299 on sale), it has the same initial cost as Oura, but eliminates the $5.99 monthly subscription that Oura charges users. Although they look very similar, reviewers generally prefer the sleeker design of the Oura. Still, its “no subscription” pitch resonates with some younger buyers who are already experiencing subscription fatigue from Netflix, Spotify, and other monthly fees.
Kilroy dismissed concerns that Oura would lose customers to price-sensitive buyers. “There’s always a risk when you introduce a new pricing model,” she said on stage, before pointing back to the retention numbers. “Our members are getting a lot of value from (our products) and are happy to continue paying for them.”
In fact, Kilroy doesn’t seem particularly concerned about including all demographics. Instead, she’s focused on keeping Oura’s core users happy while organically attracting new segments. And while young women are also becoming part of that core market, a trend she believes is due to broader changes, Oura also notes the opportunities it presents. “We’re seeing that they’re drinking less,” Kilroy said. “They really focus on mental health.”
This momentum has led Oura to further enhance features such as menstrual cycle tracking and fertility insights. “Because we accurately measure body temperature, our accuracy in detecting ovulation is very high, almost 97%,” Kilroy explained. The company recently rolled out perimenopause capabilities and expanded pregnancy capabilities.
In other words, Oura is focused on serving a growing female demographic, at least for now, rather than going after young male athletes who count VO2 max. As Kilroy told me, “We’re more than just a fitness tracker. We’re a health platform. … What we’re really focused on is preventative health to avoid burnout and avoid disease. (And) finding really important clinical and health-related illnesses early.”
As Kilroy learned at Airbnb, “you’re constantly looking at your own race, your own characteristics, and the products you ship.”
That’s a smart play. The market of people who want to optimize their sleep, manage their stress, and not feel terrible all the time is probably much larger than the market of athletes obsessed with training loads.
The numbers also support the strategy. Oura currently sells in 4,000 retail stores and has 1,000 partners using its API. Kilroy said the company employs more than 30 Ph.D.s and M.D.s and partners with leading research universities such as UCSF, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. This level of clinical validation creates a moat that competitors cannot easily imitate.
Blood tests are just one vector. Late last year, Oura partnered with Dexcom, a maker of blood sugar tracking wearables, on metabolic health monitoring, allowing users to overlay continuous blood sugar data with ring metrics. Kilroy tested it himself for nine months. “I couldn’t believe how much stress was affecting me,” she said, when her blood sugar levels spiked during a particularly grueling meeting. “When I’m stressed, all I want to do is run and eat a pound of chocolate,” she added with a smile. “And that’s like putting a bomb on top of already high blood sugar levels.”
Mr. Oura’s growth was not all about positive PR. This summer, the company made headlines over a $96 million contract to sell Ring to the Department of Defense, with software and analytics company Palantir providing security. Privacy advocates have raised concerns about surveillance and data sharing, which is understandable when dealing with biometric data and defense contracts.
But on stage, Kilroy remained resolute. “We do not pass member data to the U.S. government,” she said. “When we work with the U.S. government and work with data that they’re studying about their own forces in the Army and Air Force, that data is passed on to them.”
When asked what Oura learned from this financial victory-turned-public relations disaster, Kilroy added: “There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and once misinformation starts to take hold, it’s often difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.”
The Pentagon controversy reveals something important. When a device tracks your sleep, fertility, stress spikes at work, when it knows your body better than you do, trust is paramount. Oura’s retention numbers show that people trust them. This summer’s backlash underscored the fragility of trust. So the company’s refusal to go after every shiny tier looks less like a safety net and more like a discipline.
So can Oura capture all of Gen Z? Probably not. But maybe that’s okay. While rivals like Whoop corner certain markets like athletic performance, Oura is betting there are more people trying to avoid burnout than athletes obsessed with recovery metrics. And at least for now, no one seems to be switching phones to prove the company wrong.
