Dorothy Kilroy has seen her company’s smart ring on some very famous fingers. Mark Zuckerberg wears one. So does Jack Dorsey. Prince Harry does too. But when Oura’s chief commercial officer sat down at Toronto’s Elevate conference with this editor last week, she offered a surprise. She said the company’s fastest-growing user segment is not tech billionaires or wellness-obsessed executives. It is women in their early twenties.
This highlights an interesting moment for Oura. The thirteen-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. These include 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 is not whether Oura is winning right now. With eighty percent 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. Behind that, the question is whether Oura even needs to capture every demographic to succeed.
Kilroy spent eight years at Airbnb before joining Oura three years ago. She has watched both companies expand the same way, through word of mouth. At Airbnb, she suggested ninety percent of the company’s revenue ties directly to people raving about their vacations. At Oura, it is people raving about their sleep scores.
That organic enthusiasm is particularly strong among so-called corporate athletes. These are high-performing professionals trying to optimize their health to stay sharp. They are people who have realized that running on fumes is not a sustainable career strategy. As Kilroy described them, they are people 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.
This demographic, largely millennials and Gen Xers with disposable income, 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, is that Oura’s retention at the twelve-month mark hits the high eighties, while other wearables languish in the low thirties. People actually keep wearing the thing.
There is a new wrinkle, however. While Oura has captured the professional class, younger consumers are gravitating elsewhere. This is particularly true for young men obsessed with gains and recovery. The Whoop fitness band, for example, has seemingly become the unofficial uniform of serious athletes and gym enthusiasts.
The competition intensified a couple of weeks ago. Whoop 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 on the value 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 is Ultrahuman, playing the scrappy underdog. At three hundred forty-nine dollars, often two hundred ninety-nine on sale, it costs the same upfront as an Oura but ditches the five dollar ninety-nine cent monthly subscription that Oura charges. Though very similar looking, reviewers generally prefer Oura’s polish and design. Still, that no subscription pitch resonates with some younger buyers who already have subscription fatigue from services like Netflix and Spotify.
Kilroy shrugs off the concern that Oura will lose customers to price-sensitive buyers. She said that when you introduce a new pricing model, there is always risk. Then she pointed back to those high retention numbers. She said their members are getting a lot of value from the product and are happy to continue to pay.
In fact, Kilroy does not seem particularly worried about capturing every demographic. Instead, she is focused on keeping Oura’s core users happy while organically attracting new segments. Young women are becoming part of that core market, a trend she credits to a broader shift. She noted that they are drinking less alcohol and are really focused on their mental health.
That momentum has pushed Oura to double down on features like cycle tracking and fertility insights. Kilroy explained that because of their accuracy in temperature sensing, they have a very high degree of accuracy in detecting ovulation, almost ninety-seven percent. The company also recently rolled out perimenopause features and expanded pregnancy capabilities.
Put another way, Oura is more focused on serving its growing female base rather than chasing young male athletes counting their VO2 max. As Kilroy said, they are not a fitness tracker only, but a health platform. Where they are really focused is on preventative health to avoid burnout, avoid illness, and get early detection on important clinical and health-related diseases.
As Kilroy learned at Airbnb, you keep your eyes focused on your own race and the features and the products that you ship. It is a smart play. The market for people wanting to optimize sleep, manage stress, and generally not feel terrible is arguably a lot bigger than the market for athletes obsessing over training load.
The numbers support the strategy. Oura now sells through four thousand retail stores and has one thousand partners tapped into its API. Kilroy says it also employs over thirty PhDs and MDs and that it partners with research heavyweights like UCSF, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. That level of clinical validation creates a moat that competitors cannot easily replicate.
Blood testing is just one area of expansion. Late last year, Oura partnered with Dexcom, a maker of wearables that track blood-sugar levels, on metabolic health monitoring. This lets users overlay continuous glucose data with their ring metrics. Kilroy tested it herself for nine months. She said she could not believe how much stress was impacting it, describing glucose spikes during particularly brutal meetings. She added that all she wants to do when stressed is grab a pound of chocolate, which is like putting a bomb on top of already high blood glucose.
Oura’s growth has not been all positive public relations. This summer, the company faced criticism over a ninety-six million dollar deal to sell rings to the Department of Defense, with security provided by Palantir. Privacy advocates raised concerns about surveillance and data sharing, which is reasonable when dealing with biometric data and defense contracts.
But on stage, Kilroy was firm. She stated that they do not pass their member data to the U.S. government. When working with the U.S. government on research with their own troops, that data is passed to them.
Asked what Oura had learned from this financial-win-turned-public-relations disaster, Kilroy added that there is a lot of misinformation out there, and it is often hard once that misinformation starts to take hold to put the genie back in the bottle.
The Department of Defense controversy clarifies something important. When a device is tracking your sleep, your fertility, your stress spikes during the workday, when it knows your body better than you do, trust is paramount. Oura’s retention numbers say people trust them. The backlash this summer underscored that trust is fragile. This makes the company’s refusal to chase every shiny demographic look less like playing it safe and more like discipline.
So can Oura capture all of Gen Z? Probably not. But maybe that is fine. While rivals like Whoop corner certain markets like athletic performance, Oura is betting there are more people trying to avoid burnout than athletes obsessing over recovery metrics. And right now, at least, it looks like nobody is switching rings to prove the company wrong.