By Paul R. La Monica
Smart ring maker Oura is putting its best finger forward, so to speak. Oura is inching closer to its eagerly awaited initial public offering, a Wall Street debut that could help kick off a flurry of deals this fall-including a potential IPO from artificial-intelligence behemoth Anthropic.
Oura said in an updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday that it and existing investors plan to sell 50 million shares of the company at a price range at $40 to $44 each. At the high end of that range, Oura would raise $2.2 billion and have a market valuation of $15.6 billion.
Oura generates revenue from sales of its rings, which track sleep, heart rate, stress levels, and other health and wellness metrics, as well as paid memberships for advanced tracking of biometric data. The company said in its updated filing Monday that it expects to end this fiscal year with 5.7 million paid members, nearly double last year's level and up from 5 million at the end of June.
Mutual fund giant Fidelity Management & Research is a significant investor in Oura, with a more than 10% stake. GLP-1 drugmaker Eli Lilly also has a $50 million investment in the company and has indicated an interest in buying another $100 million of shares in the IPO.
Oura did not say when it plans to make its debut on Wall Street, but the IPO could come as soon as the week of Sept. 28. Oura plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol of OURA.
The Oura IPO could help jump-start the new listing market this fall after IPO activity cooled in recent weeks. SpaceX's record-setting IPO in June and the U.S. listing of South Korean AI chip maker SK Hynix a month later were the highlights of the early summer.
Since then, Jersey Mike's has been a disappointment, with shares of the popular sandwich chain trading 18% below their offering price. Nuclear energy firm Holtec postponed its IPO last week, while two other small deals, biotech Electra Therapeutics and home insurer Orion180, went public last week and have fallen below their IPO prices.
But Oura could be a catalyst for an autumn IPO revival. The company has strong fundamentals, with revenue growing 74% in the first nine months of the year to $1.2 billion. Oura is profitable as well, generating net income of $60.8 million over that period.
"Oura will be a great test of the broadening of the IPO window," said Willy Lee and Evan Schlossman, principals at Neostellar, a publicly traded venture-capital firm that has investments in OpenAI and design software company Canva, two other companies that could go public later this year or in 2027. Neostellar is also an investor in Oura competitor Whoop.
"Oura is a great example of a company that will be very well received and gives a lot of legitimacy to the other folks that are waiting in [the IPO] pipeline," Lee and Schlossman added.
Oura and other companies that might look to go public in October may also benefit from the fact that Anthropic is reportedly delaying its IPO until November. There had been some concerns among IPO watchers that smaller companies would be overshadowed by the Claude owner.
"Other issuers may not want to be in the market at the same time as Anthropic. It's a huge deal and could turn what would normally be a very exciting IPO into a relatively small fish by comparison," said Samuel Kerr, global head of equity capital markets at Mergermarket. "That could be a problem for deals that need a broad base of investor support."
But Oura and other companies could potentially squeeze their way through the IPO window before Anthropic. Data center infrastructure company Switch and SoftBank Group- and OpenAI-backed SB Energy are said to be looking at IPOs later this year. So is Inspire Brands, the owner of Dunkin' as well as Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jimmy John's, and Sonic.
These companies may all want to accelerate the timing of their deals before Anthropic sucks up the oxygen from the IPO market.
Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.