Issue 175  /  October 2, 2026  /  Feature

Oura Had the Demand. It Didn't Have the Price

72% of the smart ring maker's members are women. Investors ordered about four times the shares on offer, and the IPO is still on hold.

Oura Had the Demand. It Didn't Have the Price

Oura postponed its IPO on September 29, citing uncertainty in the IPO market, TechCrunch reported. It had offered 50 million shares at $40 to $44 each, which would have valued the company at $12.8 billion to $14.1 billion.

Orders came in at about four to five times the shares available, according to Bloomberg and Axios, but in a shaky market, buyers would not pay Oura's price. Oura is profitable and was not relying on the money to run its business, so it chose to wait rather than sell for less.

The postponement matters to women's health because Oura says approximately 72% of its members are women.

A listing would have put a large, fast-growing company with a mostly female customer base on the stock market, with a public share price anyone could compare against.

The industry has few of those, and it is losing some.

Blackstone and TPG took Hologic private in April, and Organon expects its sale to Sun Pharma to close in early 2027. AOA Dx, a company developing an ovarian cancer test, counted 276 women's health company sales and IPOs since 2000 and found that 91% were sales to larger companies. That count is company-produced and defines women's health broadly.

The timing worked against Oura. Its investor meetings ran into a rough stretch for new listings. Axios counted Oura as the third official IPO postponement of September, after Holtec Nuclear pulled its offering citing poor market conditions, and reported that swings in interest rates and oil prices were part of why Oura could not get its price.

CNBC reported that rising government bond yields were leading some investors to ask for bigger discounts on new shares. Higher interest rates make future profits worth less today, which hits fast-growing companies hardest, because more of their profit is expected later.

In a market like that, investors get pickier about what they will pay for. Comparing Oura's asking price with two listed health companies shows what they are paying for right now, which is how a company makes its money and how much of each sale it keeps, not who its customers are.

Hinge Health, which sells digital physical therapy and other care programs to employers and health plans, is the closest match. It brought in about $720 million over the past year and is worth about $7.1 billion, or roughly 10 times its revenue.

Oura's price range put it at 9 to 10 times its $1.42 billion in revenue, almost the same. The difference is what sits behind the revenue. Hinge kept 86 cents of every revenue dollar in its second quarter. Oura kept 55 cents over nine months, and 80.2% of its revenue came from selling rings and other hardware rather than memberships. Oura is growing faster, 74% against Hinge's 53%, but its growth is down from 123% in fiscal 2025, and its own filing says it expects growth to keep slowing.

Oura's price range valued it like a software company, while most of its revenue comes from hardware.

That matches the concerns reported around the deal.

University of Florida IPO researcher Jay Ritter told Yahoo Finance that the price was the main concern, and he told Inc. that investors were weighing whether Oura can keep growing this fast.

Bloomberg reported that several potential investors objected to how much stock insiders were selling- 36.5 million of the 50 million shares, or 73%- none of which would have brought money to Oura. Some also pointed to other health device companies whose shares had done poorly after going public. These reports come from unnamed sources.

Progyny shows that a women's health focus does not raise the price on its own. It manages fertility and family-building benefits for employers and health plans and brought in about $1.31 billion over the past year, close to Oura. It expects to earn $104.8 million to $109.9 million in profit this year, more than the $59.2 million Oura earned over its past twelve months. Yet Progyny is worth about $2.1 billion, or about 1.6 times its revenue. Its revenue grew 5.3% last quarter, and it kept 25.5 cents of each revenue dollar, because most of what it bills goes back out to pay for the fertility care and medications it manages. The two businesses make money in very different ways, but investors appear to be pricing Progyny on its growth and how much it keeps, not on its focus on women.

Some health companies have listed at a lower price rather than wait. Medtronic's diabetes device business, MiniMed, marketed shares at $25 to $28 in March and sold them at $20, raising $560 million instead of the roughly $784 million it had sought. Oura did not have to. It had $371.8 million in cash on June 30, brought in $328.0 million in cash from its business over nine months, and planned to spend most of what it would have raised on taxes owed when employee stock awards paid out at the listing.

The private women's health companies raising money now will be measured against these numbers.

Membership revenue that keeps most of each dollar earns a higher price than device sales or benefits management. Oura does not report how much revenue its women's health features bring in, so investors had no way to put a separate value on that part of the business, and a mostly female customer base did not change how they priced Oura. Deals in which existing investors sell most of the shares also face harder questions on price.

Oura can afford to wait for a calmer market and for investors to value it on more than ring sales.

Most of the women's health companies watching it cannot.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, legal or investment advice.

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Sources

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Reporting (secondary)

Aggregator-computed or company-produced

— Keisha, Editor of The Luteal