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Just over a decade ago, one in eight US adults owned a wearable. Today, it’s closer to one in two, and most of them never take it off.
Millions of people use the devices to monitor everything from sleep quality to heart rate variability. Investors are about to take its pulse: the sector faces its biggest test since Fitbit’s 2015 IPO, as smart ring maker Oura prepares to go public.
In 2015, the Finnish-born company sold its first sleep tracker through a Kickstarter campaign that raised $650,000. Now headquartered in both San Francisco and Oulu, Finland, it’s gearing up for a listing as early as this month that could value it at up to $16 billion, nearly four times what Fitbit achieved.
In its S-1, Oura describes itself as “an always-on health intelligence platform,” emphasizing its data and intelligence capabilities and its “highly retentive” subscription model.
“Oura is the first real public test of this newer wearable category at scale, so everyone’s watching,” said Mike Collett, founder and managing partner of Promus Ventures, which invested in fitness wearable Whoop. “If it prices well, it reprices the whole space and pulls the next wave of wearable companies toward the public markets.”
Investment in wearables and quantified self startups has reached $4.1 billion this year, according to PitchBook data, with several large deals closing, including smart health tracker Whoop’s $575 million Series G.
The sector has been helped by lower hardware costs, but the real value, according to Shapiro, lies beyond the device.
“Hardware is the distribution channel and potentially a sensing moat, but it’s the recurring intelligence layer, and subscription multiple that goes with it, that will determine long-term value,” he said. |
