Oura CEO Tom Hale Talks Wearable Rings

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All Right, we want to go back to health and wellness for a moment and turn to our health. The company is on a mission to help wearers of their smart ring live healthier and longer lives by providing personalized health data. And in fact, the company's latest funding round has or a value at five point two billion dollars. We're pleased to say joining us right now is the CEO of or Health, Tom Hale. Tom, great to have

Yeah.

So we started in sleep and you know, for everyone's information, we make a wearable ring that tracts your biometrics and.

Gives you insights and data.

And of course one of the things that are stomers are extremely interested in is metabolic health. One of the things that we did last year was start to enable people to track their meals by taking a photograph and seeing the results of what they had eaten and then

So in Aura, what we see now.

Is that people who are generally trying to monitor and manage their health and improve their and optimize their health are really focused on their metabolic health.

And GLP ones basically affect your metabolic health.

Now here's a little known fact metabolic health and GLP ones. They act on your body in a way very similar to sleep. So the more sleep you get, the better off you are. It helps reduce it helps reduce your appetite at midnight. Snacking is a real thing. If you don't sleep, you want to eat, and it also helps you feel more satisfied. So one of the things we do is we help people understand the impacts of their behaviors on all sorts of their health, including.

Metabolic got it, got it, thank you for explaining that. So the ring itself can cost about three hundred dollars, and then there's a membership fee as well a monthly fee of about six US dollars a month. Do consumers have subscription fatigue? And I ask that because your monthly fee is pretty low relative to a lot of other subscriptions out there, and I'm just wondering how you arrived at that.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I think people do have subscription fatigue, particularly for things that don't provide value. Of course, your health is priceless, and so for people who get the value out of managing and monitoring their health, actually they're willing to pay quite a lot more than the modest subscription fee that we charge. The thing that I find most interesting, as somebody who's been in subscription businesses for most of my life, is that the retention rates.

For Aura are literally off the charts.

We are better than best in class than consumer subscription products like Netflix or Spotify. It's really sunning, and I think that goes to the fact that if you've invested in a piece of hardware, which people do, they buy the ring first before they pay the subscription, and you care about your health, you will retain really, really well. And so our subscription business is both large and very very stable.

So we're very pleased with the outcome.

I am curious, Tom, where's the competition? And when this ring first started to become popular, there was this idea that you know, you were going to be knocked off in a big way. And I know there's been a few entrants in this space that have kind of come and gone or certainly didn't get traction. Well, I mean, what are you doing that? I guess these other companies can, and particularly the larger companies, you know, the Apples and Samsungs of the world.

Yeah.

I think the most important thing is that we've been doing this for a long time. As you probably know, the power of AI and machine learning really depends on data, and we've been collecting not just data from our users, but scientific research data to really inform our algorithms and inform our product. We're a science first company. We depend always on the research and always on the differentiation that.

Science can provide.

The other thing that's really important to recognize is that as people come to this market, many of them come to it thinking about the problem that they're solving is fitness. This is sort of a classic use case for wearables, So the fitbit, that's how people think about it. Whereas I think our approach has been to think much more broadly about health. So, for example, we started in sleep, we expanded into women's health. Now we're looking at cardiovascular

They want to think about all of them. So what's next for this company?

We talk about a company that's more than ten years old right now, it's at phenomenal growth, phenomenal revenue. And obviously, Tom, your appointment a few years ago a CEO raised a lot of speculation that they would be ready to go public. That was twenty twenty two. Is twenty twenty five? Are you going public this year?

You know, I don't think we have any plans to go public, and quite frankly, as someone who's operated public companies my entire life, I'm really enjoying.

Operating a private company.

Yeah, and so I don't think we've got a lot of ambition to go public anytime soon, and if we do, we will definitely let you guys know.

Yes, let's make sure that that happens. Tom final question to you, what is your fastest growing customer. Is it the young people or is it someone who is on a new fitness kick because of something like GLP one. Are they seniors?

Well, this is stunning.

So we have customers across the entire spectrum, you know, from CEOs to moms, to busy dads to teenagers and college kids who are managing their health. The interesting thing to me is that two big changes in our demographic in the last twelve months have been one women. We actually used to be majority men and we've slipped to majority women.

And that's on the back of our like.

FDA approof features like fertile window or just basically the ability to predict when you're going to have your cycle, which by the way, the ring can do very accurately

All right, Tom, I appreciate you taking time for us. Tom Hale CEO, thanks for making really hell or a health for now.