Dorothy Kilroy has seen her company’s smart ring on some very famous fingers. Mark Zuckerberg wears one. So does Jack Dorsey. Prince Harry, too. But when Oura‘s chief commercial officer sat down at Toronto’s Elevate conference with this editor last week, she surprised me, saying the company’s fastest-growing user segment isn’t tech billionaires or wellness-obsessed execs. It’s women in their early twenties.
It highlighted what an interesting moment this is for Oura. The 13-year-old Finnish health tech company essentially invented the smart ring category and turned it into a billion-dollar business. But now competitors are circling, including Samsung with its Galaxy Ring, Ultrahuman with its no-subscription pitch, and Whoop with its athletic performance mystique. Each one promises to take a bite out of Oura’s lead.
The question isn’t whether Oura is winning right now – with 80% of the smart ring market, clearly, it is. The question is whether it can maintain that lead as the wearables market splinters across demographics and use cases, and behind that, whether Oura even needs to capture every demographic to succeed.
Kilroy spent eight years at Airbnb before joining Oura three years ago, and she has watched both companies expand the same way – through word of mouth. At Airbnb, 90% of the company’s revenue ties directly to people raving about their vacations, she suggested; at Oura, it’s people raving about their sleep scores.
That organic enthusiasm is particularly strong among so-called corporate athletes, or high-performing professionals trying to optimize their health to stay sharp. These are people who’ve realized that running on fumes isn’t actually a sustainable career strategy or, as Kilroy described them on stage, “people who are trying to be the best at their game. They want to make sure their sleep is dialed in. They want to know how to exercise. They want to look after their metabolic health.”
It’s a demographic – largely millennials and Gen Xers with disposable income – that has made Oura wildly successful. The company has said it doubled its revenue last year and is on track to double it again this year. More impressive, says Kilroy, Oura’s retention at the 12-month mark hits the high 80s, while other wearables languish in the low 30s. People actually keep wearing the thing.
There is a new wrinkle, however. While Oura has captured the professional class, younger consumers, particularly young men obsessed with gains and recovery, are gravitating elsewhere. The Whoop fitness band, for example, has seemingly become the unofficial uniform of serious athletes and gym bros.
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The competition got a little spicy a couple of weeks ago. Whoop, founded in Boston 13 years ago, announced a new blood-testing service just one day before Oura announced its own blood testing partnership with Quest Diagnostics. When asked about the timing, Kilroy focused instead on the value that Oura brings to members. But the near-simultaneous rollout suggests both companies see the same future: integrating wearable data with actual clinical biomarkers.
Then there’s Ultrahuman, playing the scrappy underdog. At $349 (often $299 on sale), it costs the same upfront as an Oura but ditches the $5.99 monthly subscription that Oura charges its users. Though very similar looking, reviewers generally prefer Oura’s polish and design, but that “no subscription” pitch resonates with some younger buyers who already have subscription fatigue because of their Netflix, Spotify, and other monthly charges.
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