Oura spent the first nine months of its financial year buying its own shares back from its investors. On Monday it started selling them to everybody else.
The Finnish smart ring maker launched its initial public offering before the New York open. It is marketing 50 million shares at $40 to $44 each. At the top of that range the deal raises $2.2bn. That values Oura at about $14.1bn, according to Bloomberg, which calculated the figure from the share count in the filing. Oura has applied to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker OURA.
Read the split and the deal changes shape. Of the 50 million shares, Oura is selling 13.5 million. The other 36.5 million belong to existing stockholders. The 30-day over-allotment option of a further 7.5 million shares is also entirely theirs.
Oura keeps a quarter of its own flotation
At the top of the range, the company collects roughly $594m before fees. Its shareholders collect about $1.61bn, or 73% of the base deal. Exercise the over-allotment and the selling stockholders take close to $1.94bn of a $2.53bn deal. That is 77% of it. The release puts the point without decoration. “Oura will not receive any proceeds from the sale of its common stock by the selling stockholders,” it says.
Cash-outs are normal in a late-stage listing. The ratio is what draws attention. Most of the money raised on Oura’s debut goes to people who already own Oura. The company itself walks away with less than a third of it.
The ask has come down
A month ago the number was bigger. Bloomberg reported in August that Oura was targeting up to $3bn. The valuation attached to it was above $16bn, as TNW covered at the time. The launched deal is about 27% smaller than that ask, at a valuation roughly $2bn lower.
Set against a different marker, it still reads as a step up. Oura closed an $875m Series E last September at $10.9bn. A $14.1bn debut is 29% above that in twelve months. Which comparison matters depends on whether you were in the August book or the 2025 round.
Why the company wants the cash
The $594m lands on a balance sheet that has been emptied out on purpose. In the nine months to 30 June, Oura repurchased $1.17bn of its own stock. That included 13,295,528 preferred shares at $40.18 each in a February tender offer. It drew $375m on a revolving credit facility to help pay for it.
Those buybacks are the reason the filing shows a $924.3m loss. The operating business made $60.8m of net income over the period. A $985m deemed dividend to preferred holders turned that into a loss attributable to common stockholders. TNW set out that distinction when the S-1 first appeared. By 30 June the company held $371.8m of cash against a stockholders’ deficit of $1.62bn.
Seen that way, the Oura IPO is the back half of a transaction that started in February. Oura bought its early investors out at $40.18. It is now offering the same company to the public at $40 to $44.
The membership line is the bull case
Hardware is not what the bankers are selling. Oura’s membership revenue grew 121% to $240.5m over the nine months, against 65% growth in hardware. The membership gross margin is 89%. Roughly 94% of ring buyers convert to a paid plan and about 85% stay after a year. Sixty-three per cent take the annual option.
The company updated its S-1 on Monday. It now guides towards approximately 5.7 million paid members by the end of fiscal 2026. That would be 96% year-on-year growth, and it credits sales of the Oura Ring 5, the model it shipped in May. Members stood at 5.0 million at the end of June, so the guidance implies another 700,000 in the final stretch.
Oura sold about 3.6 million rings in the trailing twelve months and holds around 2% of the global wearables market. Eli Lilly’s $50m investment converts to stock at pricing.
What the sceptics are pointing at
Two things sit in the risk section and neither is abstract. The first is warranty. Oura booked $84.4m of warranty expense in fiscal 2025. It carried a $132.3m accrual at the end of June, having paid $75.5m of claims in nine months. For a company that sold 3.1 million rings over the same period, that is a live cost line rather than a rounding error.
The second is the accuracy question. A proposed class action in the Northern District of California challenges Oura’s marketed claim of 95% sleep staging accuracy against a clinical sleep lab. It cites research on 45 patients that put overall classification at 53.18%. Oura rejects it. “We stand behind our science, research, and accuracy claims,” the company said. It pointed to studies comparing its staging favourably with polysomnography. The suit names both Oura Inc. and the Finnish parent, Oura Health Oy.
Eighteen banks, and Robinhood is the last one
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Allen & Company and Jefferies are joint lead book-running managers. BofA Securities, Barclays and Wells Fargo Securities sit a tier below, then Citizens, KeyBanc and Guggenheim, then six more. Robinhood appears once, at the bottom, as the sole co-manager.
That placement was visible in the S-1 two weeks ago and it has survived to launch. The retail broker is in the syndicate for this deal, and it is in it last.
Founded in Finland, listed in New York
Oura was founded in Finland in 2013 and keeps its EU headquarters in Oulu. Its corporate headquarters is San Francisco, and the listing is on Nasdaq. It is the same route Revolut is now planning and the one Anthropic has chosen. European policymakers keep describing that pattern as a problem: companies built in Europe raise their public money somewhere else.
The test is not the first day of trading. It is whether 5.7 million paid members arrives on schedule. The number to read it against is the warranty line, when Oura files its first quarter as a public company.
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