Women Become the Growth Driver
As of June 30, 2026, approximately 72% of Oura’s members are women, and female membership has grown at a compound annual growth rate of roughly 143% since fiscal 2024, against 94% for men. A company that spent a decade teaching the market that a ring is for sleep and recovery — to an audience that was, in its own telling, largely male — now sells mostly to women. That divergence — who buys the ring versus what it was built around — sets where competition goes next.
What Women Actually Come For
Ask women who own a smart ring what they use it for, and the answer is not women’s health only. In a recent survey of US women who own Oura, sleep led by a wide margin, cited by 95%. Cycle tracking placed in the top three.
They did not buy a cycle management device. They bought a general health tracking device that sits on a finger with a hormonal context — the lens through which every other metric gets read.
Where the Experience Breaks
When asked what dissatisfies them, the respondents converged on three statements:
- My cycle context isn’t reflected enough in Oura’s other health insights.
- I have to pay for multiple subscriptions to use Oura and other apps.
- Women’s health feels secondary rather than central to the overall Oura experience.
None are accuracy complaints. The sensing is rarely the problem; the layer that turns sensing into a claim about someone’s body is. The third is a pricing-model complaint, and structural: $5.99/month on top of a $399 ring, plus the subscriptions of other apps women run alongside it.
What It Means for Challengers
That leaves three defensible fronts: subscription economics — a one-time purchase that covers software compounds over the ownership period; data ownership — cycle history is longitudinal: nobody re-enters years of it, and two-way sync is a retention feature disguised as plumbing; and cycle as foundation rather than module — placing cycle beside Sleep, Recovery and Stress makes it a peer of the signals it modulates, while treating it as the base layer is an architecture that does not erode as the incumbent ships more.
One caution (see Lessons from Circular Smart Ring): the leader is paying to teach the market what a ring is for — a free tailwind for anyone rowing the same direction. Differentiate in the interpretation layer and the economics, not in what the ring is ostensibly for.