Smart Ring Maker Oura, Backers Seek $2.2B in US IPO | Hacker News Reader

Smart Ring Maker Oura, Backers Seek $2.2B in US IPO

bloomberg.com

24 pointselo200011 comments

I believe OURA is living on borrowed time and only exists because Apple hasn't yet entered the smart ring market. It's a repeat of the Fitbit situation. Before the Apple Watch launched in 2015, Fitbit had 30% of the wearables market. Then the Apple came in, and Fitbit started bleeding users: high end ones to the Apple Watch, and low end ones to cheap Chinese competition. Fitbit eventually collapsed and got sold in a fire sale to Google.

Apple is already rumored to be working on their own smart ring. Samsung is already in the market. This is one reason why Oura is in a rush to IPO, they need liquidity for early investors + cash to compete before Apple comes in and takes a huge slice of their market.

It's more or less the same precarious position Pebble had in the very early 2010s. When Apple Watch came out, they were wiped out.

Also, RIP to the Tile company. I haven't seen a company fade away that fast when Apple came out with Tag

I just can't see how a smart ring company is worth 14b, or how they need 2b. This seems insane to me.

https://archive.ph/VVo7y

I used an Oura Ring most of last year. The hardware was very nice, but man that app is a dumpster fire and you can't use the ring without it or the subscription. What a shame.

The advice it gives is like shaking a magic 8-ball. It flags all exercise as "high physiological stress". It's somehow worse at tagging the activity than the rock bottom cheapest smartwatches. The blood oxygen is incorrect half the time and riddled with artifacts. It fails to detect naps and the first and last hours of sleep, so it insists you're in terrible shape with high sleep debt.

Yes, I had the correct size ring and even tried jamming a spacer in there to get it even tighter than it already was. Also tried other fingers, etc. The only solution that worked was to wipe all data every once in a while so that the stats wouldn't drift so much.

There are several projects now to fetch data from the ring without subscription and display it in self hosted apps.

Isn't this similar to Apple and iMessage? As in, will inevitably stop working with impending patches

Are we still talking about that crappy little hype project that just polls the ring data from their API? That doesn't avoid the subscription at all to get the data in there to begin with. That's just using the ring as originally designed.

No, we want an offline solution directly from the ring. It doesn't seem like anyone has managed to get around needing it to call home at least once to initialize. That still requires an app install and a subscription to get started. Nobody is buying these secondhand for cheap and then truly and completely bypassing the official app.

This project is the closest I've found to doing it properly, but you still need to extract the key after initialization before ditching the official app and subscription.

https://github.com/Th0rgal/open_oura

Probably a good time to IPO now as the Apple Watch Series 12 copied a lot of their features. Also look at that PE. I guess they justify it by looking at revenue growth but the wearable market is pretty cut throat. And we are starting to see more and more competitors.

Oura are struggling hard NOT to enshittify. Their newer rings have several hardware issues, chiefly battery life, and their policies on replacements keep shifting (And becoming worse for consumers).

I've used an Oura since the early days (2021 or 2022 IIRC), and I won't upgrade from my gen3. It's been helpful for longterm health monitoring and seeing what interventions work for me, but the company is becoming anticonsumer (Much like the rest of the deranged high-growth corporations) and I don't have much faith in them.

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