Oura's filing puts a number on the longevity trade

Oura filed its S-1 with the SEC on 3 September for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker OURA. The filing shows revenue of $1.21 billion for the nine months to 30 June, up 74% year on year, net income of $60.8 million and 5.0 million paid members, an unusually profitable position for a hardware company at this stage, while Bloomberg reported the offering is aiming at a valuation above $16 billion against roughly $11 billion at its Series E a year ago. The valuation logic rests on reframing what Oura is. A ring plus a $5.99 monthly membership reads as hardware, while the filing argues for a health-data business whose moat is the record rather than the device, nearly 42 billion hours of longitudinal first-party biometric data from something people wear more or less continuously. Writing on 11 September, Scott Galloway called Oura one of the few ways a retail investor can play the fragmented $7 trillion health and wellness market, and read the ring as an old instinct sold back as a subscription, the fear of mortality. That is the part we would underline. Longevity has been a cultural obsession for years without ever being a position anyone could take. (Oura S-1)