How a little-known Finnish company became one of the world’s hottest gadget startups
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In the startup world, smart-ring pioneer Oura is a rare beast. It isn’t just a unicorn valued at more than $5 billion, but also profitable in a uniquely unforgiving realm: consumer electronics.
Oura’s smart ring is on its fourth iteration, and millions of people rely on it for tracking their health. Like a smartwatch, it monitors things like heart rate, skin temperature and movement. But what it does with that data is different—more focused on health than fitness.
For example, because the ring gathers data 24/7, its wearers wake up to a “readiness score" which factors in everything from how they slept to evidence they might be feeling stressed. These insights are a product of a huge amount of health data, including a trove volunteered by 70,000 of its users that now enables the ring to predict when a wearer is becoming sick before they show symptoms. The Oura ring has raves from reviewers, including our own Nicole Nguyen, and has been spotted on celebrities from actors Jennifer Aniston and Tom Holland to soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
Founded in 2013 in Oulu, Finland’s fifth-largest city, the rise of Oura shows how a new wave of health-monitoring gadgets are appealing to everyone from self-tracking die-hards to those casually interested in improving their health, in part by doing things smartwatches cannot. The Oura ring’s focus on living a balanced life—the ring will tell you when to rest, rather than chastising you for failing to exercise—comes directly from the Finnish culture of its founders, says head of human resources Marjut Uusitalo. She joined the company in 2016, but has known the three co-founders of the company since they first
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