Oura CEO Drops Bombshell on the Future of Health Tech — and It Starts With Your Finger | NYNext

How I mean, you just launched another generation. So, you're you're rapidly. We are iterating rapidly. I mean, I think part of this is that, you know, people have been interested in a smaller ring for basically since we've introduced it. Progressively smaller with each generation. And this is a massive leap. I mean, this is really, I mean, you can look at them on my my hands. I mean, look at the difference. These are the same size rings for my fingers. They're both size 10. And just look at the difference. I mean, look at that. That is, it's dramatic, right?

It's exactly right. That's my wedding band. And and so I we we know that like women with smaller hands are going to really really be drawn to this. And we know that actually men who are looking for something that seems more like a wedding band size ring, they're going to be all over this. And the maybe most important thing for some people will be that they can do all sorts of things that they felt like they might not be able to do because they were worried about damaging the ring. Things like curls or anything that you're kettle bells, stuff where you're actually wearing the ring and working out like it's now small enough that it's very very comfortable to do. So

Uh, yeah, it's about quadrupled. Yeah.

So, you know, I I joined right right after COVID and uh in in that period, we've we've really seen the business accelerate, you know. I mean, I think uh I think we just announced this last week. Um, we have five million uh paid subscribers. You know, I think uh in 2025 we did a billion dollars of revenue. Like we really have become kind of a a force in the wearables industry. One we're obviously the the world's best known and most famous smart ring, but in the wearables industry overall, we were quite the force. So that's been exciting. We've introduced a lot of new features. Um we started in sleep. Many people know Oura as the sleep ring, but we expanded to women's health. We expanded to heart health. We span into metabolic health. So, we've gone across this entire span of people's health and you know the adoption of it has just been crazy. I've I've been in business you know for like 40 quarters of my life and I've never seen anything like the last few years. It has been a rocket ship.

I think that's true. I think uh a couple things have happened here in the last couple years. Okay, let's just talk about a global pandemic which was a health crisis for everybody on the planet and as a result I think people woke up to the idea that health is actually somewhat fragile and that they can have some empowerment and frankly people also got educated. You know a lot of people are spending time on on Google and trying to figure out let me go to the read the latest study on this. People are way more literate about about health and maybe understanding and I think part of that is because of COVID. I think it's really been a change. I think the second thing is the technology, the comfort, the wear, the use cases, you know, being an attractive form factor, all these things have really come to the fore. I think the the third thing and I think this is like I think this has been going on for a while but people are understanding how important sleep is. Um you know about 10 years ago I mean I think it was like I'll see you in AA we'll be up all night and isn't that great. And no one was really thinking about like the long-term impact of that. And by conversely, people are now so much more aware of how important sleep is for cognitive performance, for performance overall, for physical performance. People are saying it's not just the workout. It's actually the recovery after the workout. That's what makes the workout most valuable, most effective, makes you optimal and and for physical performance. People are understanding their health. People want to know how do I live a longer, healthier life? What are the things I should do? Turns out sleep. That's my advice to you. If you guys all want to live well, take make sure you're sleeping well.

Everyone wants a silver bullet. But you're totally right. It's like a lot of little behaviors that compound over time. That's what longevity is.

Think about it. Here's how I think about it. Based on that, well, the thing is is of course like the body doesn't lie. Okay. I mean, the the physiology is telling you something and and we call it giving your body a voice. And you know what? It's your choice whether or not you want to hear it or listen to it or act on it. And maybe knowledge is power. And it's better to know than it is to not know. Now, at the same time, it actually cuts both ways. And I'll give you an example. There was a NBA basketball player, guy named Chris Paul. Okay? And uh he's been in the NBA for a long time. I think early 2000s. He once got a readiness score and it said, 'Bring it on.' That was the message. And it was like high 90s. And you know what that day was? That day was like game seven of the uh Western Conference Finals. And you know what he did in that game? He scored 42 points. And for those of you who don't know anything about basketball, scoring 42 points in a basketball game is epic. That is an amazing performance. And so

I love soccer. But you know, but I definitely appreciate that. But the but the point is is that it cuts both ways. The thing is is that you do have your physiology changes. By the way, if you're a woman, your physiology changes a lot every 30 days. Men, not so much, but it does change. And so for him, he'd had a great night's sleep. He was in a great mental state. His physiology was tuned and he had a baller day. Now, the thing is is that maybe you think you feel great and if the objective truth is you don't, or maybe even worse, like you're getting sick, you're on the path to getting sick, which by the way, I don't know if that's ever happened to you. Has Oura ever told you you're getting sick? That's a superpower. That's a superpower. I have daughters. That's a superpower.

Oh my god. So, but so your point, I guess, then is that it's better to have this information and that it also does incentivize, right? People like that sort of oxy uh the the hit of I was going to say oxycotton. No, that the hit of sort of dopamine where you see something and you you have a good score and you think that sort of ultimately over the long run will incentivize people to say, you know what, I want to get a good score. I'm gonna

Yeah. Right. Everybody wants that. And so those healthy behaviors, by the way, that's the hardest part of the health problem is getting people to change behaviors. Why? Well, because we're human. Turns out that that is a a feature of human nature. Um, I don't know about you, you probably go to the gym a lot more than I do, but like getting that motivation. That's the hardest part.

The thing is, if you keep doing that long enough, you know what happens? You live a longer, healthier life. And that's what Oura is about. It's not about people get like obsessed with oh it's about the data and the scores and I want to have a better score than you and competition and no it's not. We're trying to keep you calm. Yeah. Trying to keep you like chill. Like that's what we're saying. Now we do we do hold you accountable. I don't know if you've ever experienced that but we're like hey you know maybe you know try try and you know

I think I think it's less about trying to get engagement for engagement's sake. I mean, literally, but I think I think it's the idea that you get you you feel a personal sense of satisfaction. You feel for some people that's just I think some people like they wake up in the morning and we have this thing called the morning moment, right? You have a night's sleep. If you look at your phone, you say, 'How did I do?' 'Oh, I did good.' And and that kind of prepares you for the day. I think that is true. There is a psychological element here. But the reality is is we're also trying to, you know, I don't know, give you a sixth sense. We're trying to tell you things you don't know. If you have 12 tequilas, okay, and you did that last night.

Well, maybe maybe we'll go back.

Okay. So, the thing is, exactly. You know, you're gonna feel like crap the next day, but what about half a tequila? What about a tequila at 8 PM versus 9:00 PM? What about not, you know, having a tequila and and trying some other kind of like that's the kind of experimentation sort of an accountability part. It's accountability, but it's also knowledge because we were not born with manuals for us. And by the way, you and I, we're different. Our genotype is different, our health history is different, our age is different, our gender is different, all those things are different. And so if you have knowledge and power and data about what's going on with your body and your behaviors, you're going to make better choices because you have more information. By the way, not generic information like go to bed at 8:00 p.m. That might not be good for you. You might be a night owl. Maybe you go to bed at midnight. Great. But if you know that that's good for you, keep doing it. If it's not, try going to bed earlier.

Well, this is really interesting. So, I mean, everyone is going to pay attention to this Oura Ring 5 because it's so small. It's so beautiful. It's so elegant. We think this is going to uh I mean, it's going to knock the cover off the ball. I mean, yes, go ahead, take a look, see what you think. Um, we know that that's part of it, but the reality, what's most exciting about this uh rev to the technology is actually in the software. So, there's um uh I'll give you an example. So, the first one is something that we call health radar. You know, symptom radar, the red clowns, major signs, all that stuff. You know, you know what I'm talking about. So, we're taking not just infection, which is basically what um a symptom radar is. It's looking for signs of your body responding to a physiological stressor.

Yeah. And and partially because like what we're really looking at is a complex of of activities. It's your heart rate, it's your resting resting heart rate, your temperature, your respiration, and your heart rate variability. And slight deviations from your baseline is really indicative of uh an oncoming illness. And and this science was developed during COVID because we became a predictor of COVID because we could see uh we had a study there were 65,000 people in the study. They all wore Oura rings. 9,000 of them got COVID and we traced back their data using machine learning and two and three quarters days before they got symptoms we saw what was happening in their physiology. That pattern chick, you know, those change in those that is a very clear signal of oncoming because your body is reacting and we're seeing the effects of that reaction before you feel it. Yeah. We're telling you something you don't know. So that's symptom radar. What we do in uh Oura Ring 5 is something called health radar. Health radar is symptom radar and we've added two other sort of sensing uh opportunities. The first one is blood pressure. So we start to tell you like hey your blood pressure is uh behaving in a way that would be suggestive that you might you you might want to pay attention to it. Kind of in the same way we do with symptom radar and uh we look at the pattern overnight. Uh turns out that if you're a nighttime dipper, your blood pressure dips overnight, it's actually really healthy and good. Your heart's recovering, cardiovascular systems recovering. If you don't dip, not good. If you are a riser, your nighttime riser, pay attention. So, that's one. The other part of health radar is is looking at breathing disturbances because when you sleep, if you have breathing disturbances, you're not going to get good sleep. That puts stress on your heart and your system. And so, those are two new dimensions. That's called health radar.

Um, and so lots of people are trying to understand how their body changes on GLP-1s. Obviously, weight loss is one of it, but other things happen too. Your heart rate elevates. You have to know what the right dosing is. There are some people who get side effects. If you think about the pill, there's sometimes more side effects from the pill than an injection. So, there's all these things that we're trying to help people understand what's going on their physiology as they go through GLP1. There's live activity tracking. Lots of people want live activity tracking. And so, we provide that now. You know, you can look and you can see your live heart rate as you're as you're exercising. There there are lots of things that we're doing in the software that are really really exciting. The last one I'll just spend a minute. We haven't mentioned AI once.

It's very important. AI. I heard it's going to be big, right? Yeah. I just learned about this morning. Um No, but so we just have a feeling. We have an AI adviser in the product and one of the things that we're introducing is the clinical AI and we partnered with an actual um AI clinician called Council. They are the best in the world at being a doctor using AI. They actually have doctors behind them, 50 state medical clinic. And when you want, say, let's say you get one of those symptom radar alerts and you're like, what is going on? You can escalate directly into a conversation with an AI, CL clinical AI, and then from there you can actually talk to a doctor. And so this is a this is kind of a big idea. This is like Oura is not like a sleep tracker. It's a health platform. Yeah. And that train that change I think it it's coming. It's already here. uh it's just getting more and more broadly distributed and I think that's where we are. We're in this moment where AI is changing everything and I think we think that a wearable, a smartphone and a clinical AI is changing the nature of health.

I I think we talk about this idea of connected care. We're not going to do everything. We're going to find you the partners um to make sure that you're getting the right care to get the kind of care that you need. And so so we have this idea of connected care. Our role in this is to be helping with preventative behavior change that bends the curve on the cost of healthcare and bends the curve on your own personal healthcare journey. Great. We do that a pretty good job. We're going to do an even better job. That's the prevention side. The other side we just talked about a little bit. It's this prediction side. And we don't want to send people in to get care who don't need it. We want to send you to care, you know, when you need it. And we want to make sure that we're capturing it. So, let's use Health Radar as an example. Lots of people have what's called obstructive sleep apnea. About 20% of the population and if you're an older man more problem is only 4% get diagnosed and if we can help close that gap that's actually improving a lot of outcomes and saving a lot of money if we can help do that that's the future the future is is both prevention let's let's not get people sick at all let's have them live longer healthier lives by changing their behaviors over time but let's predict and find out that they're getting sick sooner and get them into care sooner because you know what if you get care sooner you have a better chance of a better outcome. Now that's really easy to say and it's very very hard to do and I think we've you know we've devoted our entire life and company to like making that happen and I think we're making real progress on actually setting that up. I I think in the next four or five years it's going to be transformative to the way healthcare is practiced in the country.

It is today. We we have we have a partner called Essence Health. They're an insurer and a provider. So, they're both a, you know, a network of of clinicians and they're also an insurer and they work with Medicare Advantage patients who are 65 and above and their whole premise is put an Oura ring on people, they will change their behavior and we'll have a lower incidence of outcomes because when you're 65, you're not changing jobs and changing insurers, you're going to be with this company for a while, right? So, they're actually incentivized. So, they have a motivation, they have a motivation which is, you know, self self-interested to really help that. So, one of the things that they do, so take this sleep apnea use case. So, uh, if someone puts an Oura ring on and we monitor them for a few nights and we're like, 'Something's happening at night. We can see it. We can't diagnose you. We are not a diagnostic. We're not an FDA approved medical device. But what we can do is send a message over to Essence that says, 'Check out this person. They are at risk for sleep apnea.' That message goes into their system. Their system has an AI doctor. That AI doctor reaches out to you and says, 'Hey, answer this uh seven question or eight question survey called Stop Bang. It's the survey that doctors ask you to determine whether or not you have sleep apnea.' You answer the questions and then that record goes into your health record and says pretty high probability this person has sleep apnea and from that point they can either diagnose and if they decide on a diagnosis they can automatically get you into treatment. Now think about that from a device on your body sensing something to a treatment in an automated way without a human being having to get involved. Okay now maybe a human wants to check in and make sure the diagnosis is correct. So, but think about that that exists today. That is transformative. Essence Healthcare is an innovator and leader in what's happening in healthcare right now. That is a new way of practicing medicine because normally what happens is

Yeah. And then you're actually getting, you know, a bypass and it cost the health care system $50,000 just to have you come to the hospital.

I think what happens is you not only have to have the right incentives, but you also have to have empowered consumers. And I think this is something that I think again going back to like the transformation that COVID wrought and wearables and all that stuff. What's happening is like you know people are like I need to be responsible for you know no one's coming to save me. Should I wear a mask? Should I not? Am I going to get sick? What happens do I do if I do get sick? What like people have really started to realize that having agency in their healthcare journey that is a thing. So how do you do that? Well you educate yourself. Well you get a wearable. You start thinking about the things that you can do. You start researching whatever issue you might have. And by the way I will say this. I think for women particularly as women have been understudied by medical science for years. It was not until 1992 that women were part of clinical trials. Okay, which is how you determine if a surgery or an intervention or a medical device or a drug is like allowed to be given to people. Not allowed before 1992. So all this science in many ways doesn't even contemplate women's health. So, one of the things that we're doing is really helping to change that by gathering data, helping people understand their health, helping health literacy about women's health, driving new science. Like, we're starting to learn about like what it means that when something happens in a woman's body, we we're learning this stuff as we go. Totally.

Sure. You've got you've got you've got objective information that that says oh it's not like oh well you know here try try try tapping your forehead and maybe that'll uh reduce your blood pressure right

Yeah. Yeah. So, first of all, for us, we think of ourselves as a healthcare company and we we are bound by kind of the privacy and security regimes of of that kind of company. So, essentially of a HIPAA, HIPAA, um GDPR, these are all the the ways that we sort of are are making sure that your data is safe. Maybe secondarily, we've made a commitment to our customers from the get-go uh that we will never share or we will never sell your data. We exist for you and your health. Um if you choose to share your data uh you want to be part of a scientific study you want to use uh or a data with another app we will allow you to do that but we will never do that without your consent or without your permission without your intent. So that that's like a baseline for us. Now maybe maybe more importantly if you think about uh women's health in particular uh it's a pretty sensitive topic and so as a result we're very very careful and we will you know in fact not only do we uh not share we don't make it available um just because in some sense like we don't want people to make a mistake and then have that be a problem for them. So we're very very focused on this idea the privacy map and by the way what that I think reinforces is that we have no incentive to do that. Go back to incentives because what do they say about some products? They say if you're not paying, you're the product. Right. Right. Advertisers are paying to get access to you and your data is the way that they decide that they should sell you cat food or, you know, uh fancy jewelry or whatever like that. They're they're using that to target you. We don't do that. And not only do we not do that, we don't have an incentive to do that. Why? Because you know who pays us? You do. Right? That's a little bit why you pay a subscription model. So that we have no incentive to take that data and try and monetize it in some other way.

I think the way we think about it is that the subscription piece is designed to help us continue to invest to make the product even more valuable. In a typical hardware software model, you buy the piece of hardware and you don't pay anything beyond that. And as a result, the software doesn't change. In fact, it only changes when the new hardware comes out because they're like, 'Look at all these new features.' And you want to get the new hardware to get the new features. For us, we receive, every couple of weeks, we're releasing new features. And so as a result, you buy this hardware once, but you get this whole stream of new value and that's subsidized by the subscription. In fact, that's a big way that we think about it.

Now, the power of that is when you have a hardware product, it moves at a relatively, you know, kind of relative to software, a relatively slow pace. We have traditionally released hardware once every three years, and so it takes a long time to do that. But in those three years, we add a ton of value in terms of the software value, new features, new capabilities. We introduced women's health. It wasn't even a thing when we introduced the ring. It wasn't a feature, but we introduced it. And that model I think is really powerful because it allows us to add value over time.

Now, at the same time, the way we approach it is that if you have the previous version ring, we're not going to deny those features to you. So, if you have a Gen 4 ring and we introduce new features, unless it requires a new sensor on the ring, you're going to get it and it's part of your subscription. So, it's a new model and frankly it's really pretty innovative. Not many hardware companies do it, but it's made Oura very special. We're as a business better than, you know, best-in-class in terms of every metric in terms of retention. We just announced this last week, after a year 80% of our customers are still paid customers. And you compare that, that's better than Netflix or Spotify.

Yeah. Right. And it's like, oh, I forgot I had that subscription. And then you look at your credit card bill, you're like, oh my god, I've been paying for this thing for months and I haven't been using it at all. That is not the way Oura works. People look at Oura three times a day, seven days a week.

It has, there are no new sensors. Smart sensing was one of the things that we innovated on for the ring, and so this has a new version of smart sensing and what that basically does is it changes the position of the sensing pathways as you rotate the ring as we're always looking for the strongest signal. That's what allows us to have a lower battery draw.

Yeah. Well, and think about it like your heart pumps, blood shoots down here. This is the leading edge of the pulse waveform. It's like this is an artery.

We recommend this. The reason why is because your vasculature goes like this. And so with each successive digit you're getting kind of like a little bit further and further weaker signal.