Oura is a women’s health company. There, we said it. Not in a “rah rah femtech” way, but based on real user demographics and use cases. It also may be one of the biggest. Oura’s CEO shared that it was on track to double to $1B in revenues at the end of last year, while targeting $1.5B in sales for 2026.

If Progyny in the fertility space is considered a women’s health company, which the market widely perceives it is, then Oura certainly meets the definition. Progyny is considered a women’s health company, even though fertility-related challenges are related to men’s health roughly 50% of the time. But women’s health isn’t confined to childbearing or menopause. A women’s health care company should include cardiovascular health, musculoskeletal health, oncology, and more, because women may have a very different experience as patients versus men. And Oura, as a wearables company, is building a vast data set that pertains specifically to women that may fill in many of the gaps in care that exist for women. 

Oura monitors heart health, glucose levels, and sleep, which are all important to its female users, and it has gone deep on features tracking menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause. It also inked deals with women’s telehealth platforms, so that patients can have their Oura data directly in their electronic medical record. And one cannot ignore that 59% of its users are women, per a 2024 release. At this point, it’s likely higher than that. 

As such, it represents the first women’s health company to confidentially file for an IPO since Progyny in 2019. According to news reports, the number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed public offering are still not determined. While this is a market for splashy IPOs, it hasn’t been the kindest environment for health tech, med tech, or DTC consumer tech brands. 

What distinguishes Oura is that it’s one of the few, if not the only, wearables companies that skews female. It is highly unusual in the wearables space, and blazed a trail for new female-focused wearables such as Lumia and Incora. This dearth makes sense because it’s more difficult to establish a woman’s baseline metrics. As biohacker Bryan Johnson recently stated, it takes 3 months to account for cycle-driven fluctuations vs. 1-2 weeks for men, and that adds complexity in tracking and interpreting the data points.

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Transitioning to a women’s health platform

In recent months alone, Oura has taken a series of deliberate steps to reach out to women:

• It has hired physicians and product leaders specifically to build out cycle tracking, fertility insights, and menopause features.
• The company made partnerships with telehealth companies like Natural Cycles, Maven Clinic, and Evernow to connect users to telemedicine for deeper support. The Natural Cycles partnership offers a way for women to access medication-free birth control, which is heavily marketed to Gen Z women. 
• Oura launched pregnancy insights and a perimenopause check-in that blends self-assessment, data visualization, and in-app care pathways.
• The team built a custom AI model built around women's health with a privacy-first design, because women shouldn't have to worry about their employer finding out they're pregnant or trying to be.

Oura has evolved from a general wellness wearable to more of a women’s health platform,  not because it abandoned broader wellness or men generally, but because women’s health became its strongest wedge, differentiator, and growth driver. The women’s health market is growing year after year and is poised to reach $600B by 2030.

-Very few companies have invested in menstrual cycle prediction, fertility insights, temperature trends, pregnancy use cases, and menopause symptom tracking. Women are using it to track whether they’ve conceived, to log symptoms that could be relevant to potential diagnoses, and to check whether they’re experiencing symptoms of perimenopause. 

That’s also a major driver of retention. Once a user has learned that drinking alcohol late at night messes with their sleep, they might not need to continue wearing the ring and paying for the software. But for women experiencing immense shifts as they move into midlife and beyond, an Oura ring, or similar wearable, might represent a unique way to understand their own health. 

How will Oura trade?

Filing for IPO is more the starting gun than the end of the battle, and the question remains how Oura will trade. Macro noise aside, 2026 has been a difficult backdrop for health tech companies, with the sector on average trading down 13% YTD despite a boost from two acquisitions (Talkspace and Trubridge). 

There is also an argument in the markets that tech-adjacent direct-to-consumer companies are structurally fads and a poor fit for the public asset class, as they are more trading vehicles than long-term holdings. This can be seen in the boom and bust nature of many of these assets since their initial public offering: Peloton (PTON) is down 77%, GoPro (GPRO) is down 97%, Stitch Fix (SFIX) is down 78%, and Allbirds (BIRD) is down 99%, inclusive of its meme-worthy AI-pivot. 

Fitbit’s IPO represents the best case study for Oura, given the business model parallels. Notably, the wrist wearable company had an auspicious debut on the stock market. The company went public in 2015 at ~30x forward P/E before rapidly doubling to a 60+ forward multiple, more than double its very generous comp set of Consumer Internet, Consumer Electronics, and Consumer Health. But in the following two years, its stock value swung up and down before cratering, reflecting the ephemeral nature of DTC success. By the time Google acquired Fitbit in 2021, there was no P/E multiple to speak of– the company was no longer profitable. Looking at this from a revenue multiple perspective, Fitbit’s arc represented a derating from ~6x revenues to ~1x revenues.

Ultimately, while these names are all tech-adjacent, their retention and scaling are still largely DTC. Network effects are weaker, switching costs are lower, and each incremental sale (and incremental margin) is still beholden to manufacturing costs and paid search/social. 

Of course, that’s if Oura trades at all. There are still rumors of an acquisition by Apple, but that would be a departure in strategy, given the company tends to make smaller buys for IP over hardware. That said, Oura has a leadership position in the ring category – and Apple could see the appeal. There are sensing capabilities that are unique to the finger, given the high volume of capillaries under the skin. 

Could it diversify?

What may guard Oura against a Fitbit-like trajectory is its increased expansion into traditional health care services. 

Some operators in the industry see a clear future for Oura as a virtual medical clinic. Rather than partner with third parties, why not bring this capability in-house? The hardest part of any medical clinic business is patient acquisition, and Oura has that built-in advantage. It’s already spent the marketing dollars to acquire a very large and growing segment of loyal users.

Per Keaton Bedell, CEO of Bridge, a company that works with clinics to integrate insurance:

“Every wearable company is integrating care into their platform — Oura with Maven and Evernow, Whoop hiring doctors, Fitbit's AI health coach. Oura has done the hard work of acquiring customers, and they're getting increasingly good at detecting conditions early — recent FDA changes to medical device policy make that even easier. Now they want to expand LTV, and care delivery is the obvious next step. Building in-house gives the biggest LTV lift and the most control over the experience, but some will outsource for focus, speed, or margin preservation. Eight Sleep's pregnancy and hot flash features also position them well to enter the space.”

Wearables will always suffer from retention challenges as standalone hardware with an app. Even Oura, which plenty of users will wear for years, has a percentage of its user base removing the device and leaving it in a drawer. The most natural way to prevent that from happening is to expand from wellness applications and into medical, even if services tend to be lower margin. That positions Oura as a “must have” versus a “nice to have” for a large segment of the population.

In our opinion, Oura’s path to winning in the long-term is maintaining its edge with women. That strategy may have seemed unconventional earlier in the company’s history, but it has proved to be the right one, creating a growth engine that has allowed the company to double last year at a scale most health tech companies never reach.

About our Author Stephanie Davis

Stephanie Davis has been a top-ranked healthcare equity research analyst for more than 15 years, with coverage spanning healthcare technology, retail pharmacy, consumer health, drug distributors, and labs. She built and led the Healthcare Technology & Distribution franchise at SVB Securities before later serving in the same capacity at Barclays, following earlier roles at Citibank and J.P. Morgan. Today, she works as a fractional healthcare technology leader, embedding with management teams during key moments such as acquisitions, financings, IPO preparation, and strategic transitions. Known for her expertise in how technology reshapes healthcare delivery and economics, she is frequently featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, CNBC, Business Insider, Bloomberg, and Today. Ms. Davis earned a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Columbia University and is a CFA charterholder. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for The New York Foundling and on the Advisory Board for GalenusRx.