Why Oura Put Its IPO on Pause

I'm not a wearable tech person, but there are plenty of options out there if you want to put on a mini computer that can spit out all sorts of data about your health. There's the ones that go on your wrist, like Fitbits and Apple Watches. And then there are those sleek metal rings made by the company Aura. Can you give us a sense of how popular this ring is? Do you know anyone with it? Oh my God, yeah, you see it everywhere, right? That's our colleague David Weiner. I'm sure you've seen people wearing it. It's, you know, living in sort of like affluent metropolitan areas. You know, you just see it everywhere. It's super popular. Lots of celebrities flaunt their Aura rings, like Jennifer Aniston. You turned me on to this thing called the Aura ring. Right, the ring that measures your sleep and stuff like that. Correct, which is on my finger. Gwyneth Paltrow is one of them, right? She's talked very highly about wearing the ring. And there we go, guys. It's time for me to get in bed. One common refrain among wearers of the ring? They love that sleep tracking feature. It's like the trendy thing to do. You know, people in Silicon Valley and Wall Street are certainly wearing it. It's certainly like associated with like, cool. It's like something that people sort of like brag about. Hey, my sleep score was incredible on my Aura last night. So yeah, I see them everywhere. I know a lot of people who wear the ring. People? Are quite content with the ring. Aura was founded in Finland, and it's still a private startup with just over a billion dollars in sales. But it punches above its weight. By sales volume in the U.S., Aura trails only tech giants Apple and Google in the wearables market. Until just a few weeks ago, Aura was planning to go public, with hopes for a huge windfall of cash. And it seemed like good timing. Compared to 2025, the cash generated. in IPOs this year is up 400 percent. But for Aura, things didn't go according to plan. And the company halted its bid. It's just a paradox, right? Where you have this high-flying, fast-growing ring that's super glitzy and cool, and at the same time, it tries to IPO, and it doesn't go so well. But there's different levels of, I'll call it, flaking here, right? So, like, you could rain check dinner plans with your friends. That's kind of low stakes. Or. You can postpone a wedding, which is very high stakes. So, is what Aura did more akin to canceling dinner plans or canceling a wedding? It's definitely more akin to canceling a wedding, for sure. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Imani Moise. It's Tuesday, October 13th. Welcome to The Journal. Coming up on the show, Aura is everywhere. So, why didn't Wall Street put a ring on it? This episode of The Journal is presented to you by Accenture. Behind this podcast and the music you listen to, Spotify has a sophisticated advertising business. Accenture is deeply embedded in that business, working with Spotify to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Building. Maintaining. And optimizing. Accenture finds the friction and builds the systems that make things run smoother and faster. The result? Less time spent on operations. More time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Propel Fitness Water. With Gatorade Electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water. To help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. An Aura ring has sensors on the inside of the band that can detect things like your sleep quality and heart rate. The ring uploads data from your body to an app on your phone. And for an added fee of around $6 a month, Aura provides even more detailed information, like predicting fertility cycles and signs of illness. In one of Aura's ad campaigns, the tagline is, Wear your best life. I think maybe we can step back a little bit because it's important to remember how we got here. So I would start with Fitbit. Fitbit was the first big wearable health tracker, a device that counts your steps. That popularized the 10,000 steps, right? It brought this idea to the broader consumer market that, you know, we should be quantifying some of these metrics like our heart rate, like how many steps we take a day, how our sleep goes, a decade ago, Fitbit had its own IPO. Within months, the company soared to a market cap of nearly $10 billion. When it came out, it was like really exciting, but ultimately it struggled. And why it struggled is very important. Enter the Apple Watch. It is the next chapter in Apple's story. And here it is. The Apple Watch had its own health tracker. And all the data it gathered synced seamlessly with your iPhone. You know, if you have an Apple Watch, you get a lot more than you get with a lot of other wearables. The Apple Watch took a huge bite into the wearables market. This year, out of the top 10 rings, smartwatches, and wristbands, Apple accounted for over half of all sales by unit volume. So by the time Aura was pushing into the market, it positioned itself differently, targeting customers who wanted a simpler alternative, a cleaner one. The Apple Watch took a huge bite into the market. It was kind of a clunky piece of plastic. And even the Apple Watch gets some complaints of not being elegant, and people prefer a classic watch if they're going to a formal event. Can you talk more about how the physical appearance of the Aura Ring became an important part of its value proposition? For sure, for sure. I think it's an attractive-looking wearable, right? We went from, like, these very clunky items to now wearables that look really nice and can be used for a lot of things. And I think it's an attractive-looking wearable, right? And it can be even worn in the night out, and it looks like it goes along with your outfit. And very importantly, it doesn't have a screen. And actually, that became kind of cool because it's like, hey, I just wear this very sort of discreet, even attractive-looking ring. I don't look at the screen. It's not, you know, distracting me. And it just, you know, tells me all I need to know about my day. So I'd say that's why the Aura has, you know, sort of grown like gangbusters. Compared to other wearables, Aura's users skew younger and higher income. At the same time, the company is tapping into a broader wellness trend, promising access to the kind of advanced biometrics touted by health influencers. We're all familiar with names like Brian Johnson, Andrew Huberman. All these sort of, like, longevity gurus of our time have only become more popular. People have only become more obsessed with their sleep, with their average heart rate, with measuring their workouts, with knowing their readiness score. Like, these type of things have, like, just become really central to the way that, like, a chunk of our society lives. And there is no doubting that this is a lasting trend that is only growth, right? With all that promise for growth, venture capital investors flooded into Aura. In Aura's latest funding round last year, the company raised around $900 million. It was able to tap VCF. It was able to tap VC money because it just showed that this is a trend that is really working. Their numbers speak for themselves. They are doing over a billion dollars in annual sales now. That's a really fantastic number. So, with such good numbers, Aura decided to try its hand in the public market. But when investors began to look under the hood, they started to have some big questions. That's after the break. We'll talk more about that in a minute. But before we do that, let's take a quick look at a couple of some of the things that the company is doing. So, let's take a quick look at some of the things that the company is doing right now. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments, it's weeknight dinners. Sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So, when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9% of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. When a company wants to file an IPO, it assembles a team of advisors and underwriters. It hires auditors to go through its financials. And it writes a prospectus. Basically, a narrative about itself that the company hopes will persuade investors to buy in. What was Aura's pitch to public market investors? How were they selling themselves? That's a great question. And that comes down to sort of the core of what I think is important to this story. And it also comes down to the core of so many IPOs and, you know, investment cases. And the issue here is like, basically, if you do a control F on Aura's prospectus, I think there were over 150 mentions of the word platform. Platform. That's a word investors love to hear. Platform signals that a company isn't just selling hardware. It's also got an ongoing revenue stream. Platform means that the business keeps earning after the first sale because people grow to depend on it. Think Apple's App Store or Google Workspace. In its prospectus, Aura called itself a, quote, health intelligence platform. That's what they say they are, right? The use of artificial intelligence, data. Those are all the buzzwords that were in the IPO. And that's how the company wanted investors to see it, right? As a technology platform, as an AI-leaning company. With all that platform potential, in its IPO, Aura was seeking a valuation of about $15 billion. But a lot of investors looked at the numbers, analyzed this company, and instead they saw that it was a platform that was going to help the business. And they saw that it was going to help the business. A really high-growing gadget, wellness gadget, you know. And the difference between a fast-growing wellness gadget, product, hardware, versus a health intelligence platform is a difference of billions of dollars. Digging into Aura's financials, potential investors didn't see a platform. They saw a company that primarily made money by selling rings. According to Aura's prospectus, 80% of the company's revenue comes from product sales. The other 20% comes from subscriptions. An Aura ring costs between $400 to $500. And most customers only need one. So in order to keep growing, Aura has to keep finding new customers. And investors could see that getting those new customers was costing a lot of money. You can't miss their ads because they've been doing these ad campaigns. They had a very high-profile one during the NBA Finals. Aura has also recently signed deals with big-name athletes, including tennis stars Coco Gauff and Taylor Fritz. I wear it on my middle left finger. It just works for me. I don't really feel it too much when I'm playing. You have to spend a lot of money in advertising to keep reminding people of your product. And if you look at the numbers, they spend about 20% of their revenue on that. So investors are noticing all these things. Yes. Investors also noticed that most of the money raised in the IPO wasn't designated for growing the business. About three-quarters of the shares were being sold by existing investors cashing out, led by one venture firm selling its entire stake. Some insider selling is normal in an IPO. But this much is rare. And that raised eyebrows. After weeks of courting public investors, Aura couldn't find enough who were willing to pay what the company was asking. There were a few bigger investors, including Eli Lilly, who indicated they were willing to buy shares if other money showed up. But it never did. And so when investors didn't really bite at that price point, they backed out. Health and fitness ringmaker Aura has delayed its IPO, citing uncertain market conditions here. Aura, now delayed IPO, decided not to go forward because of concerns including the health and fitness ringmaker company's target valuation. Aura became the latest to make a U-turn on its IPO, citing market uncertainty. It was expected to. What's been their public explanation for this postponement? So Aura's public explanation was that capital markets right now are going through a bit of a difficult moment. As we know, treasury yields have been soaring and that's made markets a little bit more volatile. Right now, treasury yields are at their highest level in more than two decades, above five percent. above five percent. So if an investor wants a guaranteed five percent return, they would just put their money in the bond market. That's why soaring yields usually draw investors away from the stock market. But stocks have also been hitting record highs. Yes, there's oil market turbulence and the bond market's been freaking out, but stocks have been pretty resilient throughout all of these things. So how valid is that rationale? It's valid in the sense that, you know, if other companies also come out and say, "Well, you know, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this," if other companies also cancel their IPO, if there's also been other companies sort of delaying, postponing, then it shows that it's not just them, that there is a little bit of, like, volatility in the capital markets. So I wouldn't discount what they're saying. I mean, there's definitely some nervousness in the market. And I think had they tried to go public, like, maybe earlier this year, it might have gone more smoothly. There definitely is some nervousness. Aura said that it halted its IPO because capital markets are going through a difficult time. The company's CEO said, quote, "We have the luxury of choosing our moment." The company's CEO said, quote, "We have the luxury of choosing our moment." So where does Aura go from here? Do they wait it out and come back when they determine that there are better market conditions? Or do they really have to go back to the drawing board and present investors with a different plan? I think they have a few options. I mean, one is, you know, they could wait for more results to come in, even better results, right? They can show in a quarter or two that growth is, like, even better, and come back to the market. Maybe the markets will have calmed down a little bit and they can get the valuation that they're seeking. Or maybe they can accept a slightly lower valuation. And then, of course, they could, you know, engage in talks to sell themselves to maybe bigger tech companies. But it's not the end of the world. It doesn't necessarily spell the end of their IPO dreams. And certainly companies can show continued growth and even improved numbers and come back to the market. To David, Aura's delayed IPO shows that, across the market, there's a lower appetite for consumer tech. Investors are a little bit traumatized. There's a little bit of a PTSD going on. David says that Aura reminded investors of similar companies in the past, where a splashy IPO was soon followed by a crash in valuation. We have so many examples we can think of, like, you know, Fitbit we brought up, Peloton as well. About five years after Fitbit's peaked $10 billion valuation, the company was bought by Google for $2 billion. And then there's Peloton. After its IPO, it peaked at around $50 billion. But today, the company is valued at a little over $2.5 billion. You know, companies that were, like, single-product gadget companies that sort of, like, became really popular really fast with consumers, and then sort of, like, tapped out. Investors worry about getting into companies that consumers are really excited about. And the numbers look pretty good, but they worry that they're going to be the ones, like, standing up in the musical chair game, right? Like, they're going to be the ones, like, stuck. Holding the bag of a company once growth has slowed down, early investors have gone now, and suddenly, the company's valuation just isn't going to be as high as it once was. David has a special term for these businesses. Yeah, the one-hit wonder, of course. It just speaks to the fickle consumer and how trends can come and go. It just speaks to how things just, like, can get so popular all at once, and suddenly it's everywhere. Your friends are wearing it, your friends are talking about it, it's on TV. But then, those businesses don't have sustainable growth for as long as investors would like. ♪ That's all for today, Tuesday, October 13th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like the show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday after. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.