There’s plenty of evidence that bigger players in wearables like Apple agree. “In order to go from 180 million units last year in wearables to a billion, I think you’ve got to move from activity to all these other health applications,” he says. Most other wearables have emphasized tracking daytime fitness activities more than restful slumber, but Rai argues that the whole category needs to get more serious about additional aspects of health. Now it intends to appeal to a larger audience by doing more. “We started out as a company focused on sleep and recovery as our first iteration of that at the time, no one else was doing it.” By May 2021, the company had sold 500,000 rings. “We always felt like the future of wearables is health,” he explains.
Oura CEO Harpreet Singh Rai Oura’s widening ambitions are less a pivot, Rai says, than a logical continuation of the trajectory that it’s been on all along. The primary topic of our conversation was the company’s expansion beyond sleep tracking to a much more sweeping collection of wellness features-a move that drove the development of the third-generation Oura Ring, which began shipping last week. It’s usually as surprised as anyone when it turns out they’re fans-although he adds that “it doesn’t hurt if Jennifer Aniston is talking about us on TV.” But I wasn’t there so Rai could drop names. When I recently dropped in on Oura’s San Francisco office, CEO Harpreet Singh Rai told me that the company doesn’t court rich and famous customers.