With the wearables space certifiably exploding, the Finnish startup Oura seeks to position itself at the top of the industry with a new Series E funding round worth $900 million.
The investment, made public on Tuesday, was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, with contributions from ICONIQ, Whale Rock, and Atreides Management. It values Oura, the maker of the biometric Oura Ring device that tracks metrics like sleep quality and other health concerns, at $11 billion. Last November, Oura raised $75 million at a valuation of $5 billion.
The capital comes after Oura reported surging sales and revenue the last few years. The company claims to have sold 5.5 million devices since its founding in 2015, and doubled revenue last year with a reported $500 million. Oura projects another year of doubling revenue in 2025, according to a press release published Tuesday. The funds will be used for international expansion and also invested in further research and development.
Despite the flush revenue figures, CEO Tony Hale has previously declined to disclose whether or not the company is profitable, Bloomberg reported last month.
On the consumer side, the popularity of Oura Ring has largely been driven by women looking for more granular insights into metrics like reproductive health and sleep. But Oura’s largest customer is the U.S. Department of Defense, which it has contracted with since 2019 by providing its rings for service members to monitor their physical condition.
This summer, Oura’s relationship with the DoD was the focus of a conspiratorial firestorm on TikTok, following a report that Oura was building a manufacturing facility in Texas to serve its DoD customers. The news was muddled by influencers who accused the company of sharing user data with defense contractor Palantir. In reality, Oura uses a Palantir-developed software program called FedStart to meet military security requirements. Hale addressed the furor publicly with his own TikTok.
Wearable-maker Whoop has also partnered with the DoD—specifically, with Army paratroopers—to track soldier stress.
Sam Blum
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