Smart Rings Are a Niche Hardware Category. Oura's Subscription Math Is the Real Story.
Smart rings are still a rounding error in wearables. Industry trackers put total smart ring shipments at roughly 4.3 million units in 2025, against about 163 million smartwatches sold in the same period. Oura, the category's dominant player, sold about 3.6 million rings in the twelve months ending June 30, 2026, according to its own IPO registration filing. That's a real business, but it is not a company quietly dethroning the smartwatch. The more interesting number in that same filing is this: Oura's membership revenue grew 121% year over year to $240.5 million in nine months, at an 89% gross margin, while the hardware itself remains a comparatively small slice of a much bigger total. Oura isn't winning by selling more rings than watches. It's winning because it turned a wearable into a subscription business, and the filing shows exactly how well that's working.
The numbers behind the pitch
Oura's S-1 filing, prepared ahead of a planned Nasdaq listing, discloses figures that are considerably more concrete than the shipment estimates floating around the wearables press. As of June 30, 2026, Oura had 5 million paid members, up from 1.5 million at the end of 2024 — more than tripling in eighteen months. The company expects to close its 2026 fiscal year with about 5.7 million paid members, a 96% year-over-year increase. Membership retention over a trailing twelve months runs around 85%, and roughly 94% of people who activate a new ring convert to the paid membership tier, which costs $5.99 a month or $69.99 a year in the US.
Total company revenue for the nine months ended June 30, 2026 came in around $1.21 billion, up 74% from $697.6 million a year earlier. Membership accounted for about 20% of that — the rest is still ring sales — but membership is the part of the business growing fastest and carrying the best margins by a wide gap. An 89% gross margin on a recurring line is the kind of number that makes a hardware company look, on paper, like a software company.
Why this is the right place to look, not the ring itself
The ring is the acquisition mechanism. The membership is the business. That's not a new model in consumer tech — razor-and-blades pricing is a century old, and subscription hardware has been tried, with mixed results, by everyone from treadmill makers to smart-home security companies. What's notable about Oura's numbers is the conversion rate. A 94% activation-to-paid-membership rate means Oura has mostly solved the hardest part of that model: getting a customer who already paid for the device to then agree to pay again, every month, indefinitely. Most subscription-hardware attempts fail exactly there — customers buy the device, use the free tier or a trial period, and never convert. Oura's filing suggests the sleep and recovery data the ring surfaces is valuable enough, and sufficiently tied to a habit loop, that almost everyone who buys the hardware keeps paying for the software layered on top of it.
This also explains why the rest of the smart ring market looks shakier than Oura's numbers alone would suggest. One industry tracker put Oura's share of global smart ring shipments at around 79% in the first quarter of 2026, with total category growth slowing to roughly 3% year over year in that quarter — a sharp deceleration from the 49% shipment growth some trackers reported for 2025. Part of that slowdown traces to Samsung, which has gone quiet on a successor to the Galaxy Ring, with a next-generation device not expected before early 2027 by some estimates. Part of it traces to Ultrahuman, a smaller competitor whose US business has been disrupted by an ongoing legal dispute with Oura. Hardware-only competitors are fighting over a shrinking fraction of a market where the leader has already built the thing that actually compounds: a subscriber base that mostly doesn't churn.
The caveat: the IPO itself is stalled
Oura's own path to public markets complicates the picture slightly. The company launched an offering of 50 million shares priced between $40 and $44, targeting a valuation of up to $15.6 billion and proceeds of up to $2.2 billion, with reports in late September describing strong investor demand — reportedly several times oversubscribed. Shortly after, reports indicated Oura postponed the listing, citing broader uncertainty in IPO market conditions rather than anything specific to its own numbers. As of this writing, there's no confirmed new pricing date. The S-1 disclosures above are the company's own numbers, filed with regulators, and they don't depend on the IPO actually closing to be meaningful — they're a rare, audited look into how a subscription-hardware model performs at meaningful scale, regardless of when or whether the stock starts trading.
The actual takeaway for hardware companies
If you're building a connected device and weighing whether to bolt on a subscription, Oura's numbers argue for measuring the thing that actually predicts durable revenue: not units shipped, not even revenue growth in isolation, but the percentage of buyers who convert to recurring membership and how long they stay. A company selling 4 million units a year with a 94% conversion rate and 85% retention is a fundamentally different business than one selling 40 million units with a 20% attach rate — even if the second company's shipment numbers look more impressive in a press release. The smart ring market will likely stay a niche category relative to smartwatches for years. Whether that matters to Oura's business is almost beside the point, because the business was never really about the ring.