The Three Growth Engines
In his recent public appearances, Oura CEO Tom Hale has been unusually direct about where his company’s growth comes from. He names three sources, in descending order of impact.
Women’s health — by far the largest, it is simultaneously the company’s biggest strategic pivot and its biggest user use case.
Retail — solves two problems at once: ring sizing, and the try-on habit that buyers bring with them from jewelry. For the nine months ended June 30, 2026, approximately 49% of hardware revenue was generated through the retail channel.
FSA/HSA — access to pre-tax healthcare spending accounts removes price friction at the point of purchase.
Why Women’s Health Won
The shift in Oura’s own self-description is stark. The company began as Sleep / BioHacker / Mainly Men. By 2025 it had become Women’s Health / General Well-being / Longevity.
Two events drove it. The first was the partnership with Natural Cycles — the single largest turning point in Oura’s history, and the moment the company saw enough success with the contraception (TTA) segment to double down on younger women specifically. The second was the Gucci collaboration, which showed them what offline retail was actually worth.
Hale’s framing is that the fit was always there, and he argues Oura is already a women’s health company. The data a woman accumulates from her teens onward — contraception in her twenties, fertility and pregnancy in her thirties, menopause in her forties — supports daily, monthly, and yearly physiological change tracking across an entire lifetime. That is a longer and more continuous relationship than any single-purpose health product can offer.
The natural applicability runs deeper than that. Women already wear jewelry, so the form factor imposes no behavioral cost. Contraception is an active, recurring need. And the physiology itself creates demand for continuous sensing: circadian rhythm, the monthly menstrual cycle, and hormonal change across life stages are all signals with real variance worth measuring. Against a backdrop of women being underserved by health products generally, the segment was sitting there.
Younger women compound the advantage. They have stronger motivation to understand their own bodies and build health habits early, and they use social media more heavily — which is how the PMF surfaced in the first place. The discovery was organic: younger women using Oura and Natural Cycles together for non-hormonal contraception, talking about it publicly, well before the company had built anything to serve that story deliberately.
The Numbers
Oura’s S-1 filing shows the shape of the business across the pivot:
| Metric | FY2024 | FY2025 | 9M 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $406.8M | $907.9M | $1,215.0M |
| Rings Sold | 1.0M | 2.3M | 3.1M |
| Paid Members | 1.3M | 2.9M | 5.0M |
| Adjusted EBITDA | $37.0M | $74.9M | $106.7M |
Hale noted that Oura had sold roughly 1 million rings before he joined, and 2.5 million by the end of 2025.
The Sequencing
Through 2022 — validate on sleep and baseline tracking. Oura proved the market through the sleep use case first, reached the million-ring scale that marks a hardware product’s basic viability, and let Covid accelerate adoption on top of it.
2023 — two partnerships, two engines. The Natural Cycles collaboration revealed the women’s health opportunity; the Gucci collaboration revealed the value of offline retail. Both were discovered through partnership rather than planned in advance.
After — partnerships as a platform. Having tasted what brand collaborations could do, Oura stopped treating them as one-off marketing and started treating itself as a data platform, with partners effectively becoming distribution and sales channels. Alongside continued feature development, this produced a high volume of partnerships that function as an acquisition channel in their own right.
References
- How Oura Ring is redefining health tech — Masters of Scale. On leading the subscription transformation, the Natural Cycles and Gucci partnerships, treating partnership as a platform, and the preventative healthcare framing.
- Does AI know you better than your doctor — Masters of Scale. More detail on the organic discovery of the Oura + Natural Cycles non-hormonal contraception use case.
- Oura CEO on the future of health intelligence — The Business of Fashion Podcast. On women’s natural applicability to the category — jewelry association, contraception demand, cyclical variation across circadian rhythm, menstrual cycle, and life-stage hormonal change — and on younger women’s motivation and social media usage.