September has a funny way of turning "we'll figure that out during budgeting" into "can you have this modeled by tomorrow?"

Suddenly Sales has a new hiring plan. Marketing found three tools they absolutely need. Someone changed the revenue target. And the budget you started with is already on version 6.

Budget season is always going to mean changing assumptions. Abacum just makes those changes a lot less painful. Update the driver once, see the impact everywhere, and keep everyone working from the same numbers.

The hard part of budgeting should be deciding where to invest.

Budget season is here. Your legacy planning process doesn't have to come with it.

Oura Ring IPO: S1 breakdown

Oura has filed for an IPO on the Nasdaq under ticker OURA. The Finnish-founded health wearable company is making its public market debut on the back of triple digit revenue growth in its last full fiscal year, a trailing twelve months north of $1.4 billion, and actual GAAP profitability.

Despite my obsession with metrics and health, I do not wear one. I have three kids that are four and under. Scientifically confirming that my sleep score is in the toilet would be a mental excuse to phone in a sub par day… Plus, I already know my heels hurt from running too much, my liver doesn't need 2 miller lattes a night, and I shouldn’t have eatn my child’s left over Pirate Booty at 11PM (also did you notice the recent PB rebrand? Subtle, yet strong).

While I don’t own one, I’m in awe of their highly retentive consumer business model, which pairs hardware with software subscriptions, and successfully reaches cohorts of customers across a wide variety of gender, age, and income levels.

So I read all 362 pages this Saturday (in between shuttling kids to birthday parties). And I thought of the legendary J.P. Prewitt many times. He’s the hand model, played by David Duchovny in Zoolander.

It’s a shame he was 25 years too early to make it into this S1, because this document is literally a compilation of hand models. I really wanna know what the casting call for this was like. Did an analyst from Goldman (lead left) sit in a non descript conference room on Kearny Street reviewing knuckles and cuticles and deciding whose fingers photograph best in titanium? Did they ask about the skin routine? Was there a callback? IT PUTS THE LOTION ON THE SKIN.

Anywho.

Let’s break down one of the most fascinating direct to consumer companies in recent memory.

At its core, Oura is a sensor wrapped around your finger. The finger is highly vascularized, which Oura says gives it a signal up to 100x stronger than the wrist. Members wear the thing a median of 23 hours a day, giving Oura a constant stream of heart rate, HRV, temperature, sleep and movement data.

With five million paying members, that has turned a piece of jewelry into a pretty massive health dataset.

TL;DR: Oura sells you a ring that pays back the cost of acquiring you up front, then charges you a subscription for as long as you keep wearing it.

For their first six years they were solely a hardware company. The first Oura Ring shipped in 2015, but the subscription didn't launch until October 2021 with Ring 3.

Historically, 94% of ring activations convert to Paid Members after the initial 30-day trial. Roughly 63% of new members start on the annual plan, which runs $69.99 a year, with the remainder starting monthly at $5.99.

Retention has also improved by cohort, from roughly 81% in fiscal 2023 to as high as 87% in the more recent cohorts disclosed.

And because my middle name is footnotes:

Today, subscription makes up 20% of total revenue at an 89% gross margin. The majority of revenue is still hardware, which backs into roughly 46% GM.

They charge between $349 and $499 per ring, depending on which generation and finish you pick, but after promos, channel discounts, and whatever Costco negotiated, Oura collects $311 per ring.

Membership grew 121% over the nine months against 65% for hardware, and the mix moved up from 17% to 20%.

They have strong word of mouth.

That organic engine matters because Oura is still spending aggressively on marketing. Roughly 21 cents of every revenue dollar currently goes to sales and marketing even with 40% of new members showing up through word of mouth. Those billboards ain’t cheap.

The business has changed how it sells over time.

Direct to consumer is how it all started. What’s great about this channel, other than the margins, is they get the first party data, allowing them to experiment across onboarding, experimentation, and conversion.

Retail is about half of hardware revenue now, across roughly 8,400 doors. Amazon, Best Buy, Costco and Target are major partners. They added 39 retail partners in fiscal 2025 and another 70 in just the first three quarters of fiscal 2026, so this is a land grab and they're not being subtle about it.

While the margin on hardware sold through these partners is lower, they get distribution, and still sell all the subscription plans through their own platform. Costco might squeeze them on the one time numbers, but doesn’t get a cut of the $69.99 a year plan.

Go-to-market partners is basically a euphemism for ways to spend HSA and FSA dollars. As a health device, it’s a super smart move to tap into these budgets, since buyers can use pre-tax dollars to pay for the ring. It also includes American Express, which gives Platinum cardholders up to $200 a year in statement credits toward a ring. So a $399 ring costs you $199 and Amex eats the difference.

Enterprise has actual quota-carrying reps calling on insurers, employers and government agencies. Cigna already gives it away inside some employer plans as a covered wellness benefit. In this scenario, your HR department buys the ring for you.

Oura sold 3.6 million rings over the trailing twelve months. Against roughly 212 million wearables shipped globally, that's about 2% of global wearable unit shipments.

But that is not really the market Oura wants you to use…

The number they’d prefer is $90 billion, which they call their serviceable addressable market. It gets there by adding together fitness trackers, health and wellness coaching, digital care management, digital therapeutics and connected biosensors.

So there’s about 10 pounds of shit in a five pound bag.

The important part is why they’re doing it.

Oura does not want to be valued as a fitness tracker. Garmin and Whoop live much closer to that bucket. Oura wants investors to think of it as a preventative health platform (that includes a ring).

They drop the word “preventative” 18 times and “proactive” 24 times in the filing.

And that positioning makes more sense when you look at who is buying it.

About 33% of new members say Oura is their first wearable, while another 29% say it replaced an existing one. So a meaningful chunk of growth is coming from people who were not already wearing a Garmin, Fitbit or Apple Watch.

And the customer base does not look like the stereotypical biohacker Bryan Johnson cohort I had in my head.

72% of members are women.

Female members have compounded at roughly 143% since fiscal 2024 versus 94% for men. Cycle tracking, conception, pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause give Oura a sequence of use cases that can stretch over decades.

Some of the other demographics surprised me too:

I went in expecting Oura to look like a Bay Area status symbol. The customer base is much broader than that.

There’s a pretty nasty blemish hiding inside that gross margin.

In fiscal 2025, Oura recorded an additional $84.4 million of warranty expense because batteries in certain cohorts of the Oura Ring 4 were not performing the way they were supposed to. Customers were getting replacement rings, sometimes even after the normal warranty period had expired.

That helps explain why gross margin fell from 65% in 2024 to 52% in 2025.

As of June 2026, Oura was carrying $132 million of accrued warranty liabilities, up from $98 million nine months earlier. Its reserve for product returns had also more than doubled to $88 million.

The good news is it appears to be getting better. Gross margin recovered to 55% during the first nine months of 2026, which Oura attributes in part to lower warranty rates and lower manufacturing costs per ring.

But this is the part of the S-1 that reminds you Oura still makes physical shit that breaks from time to time.

Oura is also stepping on the gas pretty hard in sales and marketing.

Sales and marketing expense went from $108 million in 2024 to $202 million in 2025, an 87% increase. Of that increase, $44 million came from paid media and advertising meant to drive customer acquisition and brand awareness, with another $17 million tied to retail and distribution expansion.

That spending has continued into 2026, especially around new product launches and the expansion into retail. Oura specifically calls out heavier advertising and marketing around Ring 5 and its growing retail footprint.

This is one of the more interesting tensions in the business. Oura says 40% of new members come organically through word of mouth, which is fantastic, but it is also spending heavily to turn itself into a mainstream consumer brand.

And there is still a lot of room to go. U.S. aided brand awareness was only 38% in the third quarter of 2026, and management explicitly says it plans to keep investing in the brand.

That makes the spend feel a little different from a software company dumping money into Google Ads to manufacture pipeline. Oura is trying to make the ring itself culturally ubiquitous.

One thing that does look legitimately strong is cash generation. Oura produced $328 million of operating cash flow through the first nine months of 2026, more than double the year before, although a big chunk of that came from working capital, particularly higher accrued liabilities, deferred revenue and payables.

1. Samsung is asking the Trade Commission to block Oura Ring imports. And Oura owns no factories.

The ITC can't award damages, but it can block you from importing stuff. And that would be a problem.

Oura assembles nothing. Contract manufacturers build the rings and every unit clears customs before it reaches a Best Buy shelf.

Oura's counter is essentially, “hey we have 1,140 patents. Cut the shit.”

2. A class action says they falsely advertise their sleep accuracy.

Eighty-seven percent of members told Oura that accuracy was a reason for buying, so this wouldn’t be good.

3. The former CEO is suing the CFO and the board. Plus three other parties who want equity too.

Harpreet Singh Rai ran Oura until December 2021.

The dispute centers on the September 2024 agreement under which Oura repurchased his equity, shortly before the company’s private valuation moved materially higher.

In May 2026 he sued in Delaware, naming the company, its CFO, and certain directors, alleging securities fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and negligent misrepresentation, and asking for rescission.

The list of disgruntled people also includes Peter Attia, who has been on multiple lists lately, and says he was promised stock.

4. Two customers are 22% of revenue. Five are 82% of receivables.

This is an interesting development for a company that started as direct to consumer. A lot of what Oura is owed is concentrated amongst five customers who presumably have a hell of a lot more negotiating leverage than the people buying rings on their own dot com website.

5. No internal manufacturing, single source suppliers, and tariffs across six countries.

Semiconductors, sensors, batteries, circuit boards and titanium are all critical to their rings. And many come from suppliers that Oura names as single source. They also have tariff exposure across Estonia, Finland, Mexico, South Korea, China and the Netherlands, including reciprocal tariffs on metals (their product is mostly titanium).

For context, as part of the normal course of business, they commit to twelve-month rolling forecasts with their manufacturers.

Good news though! They get the greenlight on the following:

They're just kinda being sued by a bunch of peoples.

Like I mentioned, there’s one class of common stock, one vote per share, and nobody holds a super-voting block. Makes things clean.

The +5% holders are FMR, which is Fidelity, plus Forerunner Ventures, Bedford Ridge, and Lifeline Ventures out of Helsinki. AT the moment the percentages are blank, so we know who but not how much.

One of the stranger things in the filing is how much liquidity Oura gave existing shareholders right before the IPO.

In fiscal 2025, the company spent $308 million buying back common and preferred stock. Then, in the first nine months of 2026, the pace accelerated dramatically. In February alone, Oura ran a $534 million tender offer at $40.18 per share, followed by another $437 million of repurchases signed at prices as high as $56.25.

At first I thought: why the hell would these shareholders sell if an IPO was right around the corner?

Then I looked at the prices.

Forerunner led Oura's Series B, which was issued at a weighted-average price of about $0.77 per share. In February, Oura bought $65 million of their stock back at $40.18 per share, or roughly 52x the Series B price. And Forerunner was still a major shareholder afterward (they still tripped the +5% threshold).

That's a pretty easy way to take some chips off the table without giving up the upside.

The more interesting part is what Oura was doing on the other side. It raised more than $1 billion of new preferred capital in fiscal 2025 while simultaneously using hundreds of millions of dollars to cash out older shareholders.

Basically, Oura created a massive private liquidity event right before creating a public one.

My guess is these were early investors and employees taking some chips off the table after enormous gains, while still keeping plenty of exposure to the IPO. And while it’s close, they probably weren’t as sure back then that they’d be filing to go public in September. The filing doesn’t say why they sold, but at 40x or 50x your entry price, taking partial liquidity isn’t exactly irrational.

An interesting point about RSUs for all the CFOs out there…

Oura has 18.8 million performance stock units sitting out there, and the IPO is about to flip one of the two switches required for them to vest.

Most private company RSUs have two triggers. You have to work there long enough to earn them, and the company has to actually go public. That second condition is important because it keeps employees from getting whacked with a tax bill on private stock they can't sell.

Oura's awards work the same way. The IPO satisfies the liquidity trigger, but that does not mean all 18.8 million shares suddenly vest. Employees still need to have satisfied the time-based portion of their awards.

The fun accounting part is Oura hasn't been recording most of the expense associated with these awards because, under GAAP, they couldn't treat an IPO as probable until it actually happened. As of last September, there was $169 million of stock comp expense sitting there waiting to be recognized.

Once the IPO happens, Oura will immediately recognize the accumulated expense on the portion employees have already earned through time served. The rest gets recognized as they finish vesting.

And then there are taxes.

When those shares actually settle, they're compensation, so employees owe ordinary income tax based on the value of the stock. Oura plans to withhold some of the shares and use cash to send the associated taxes to the government. That's the “RSU Net Settlement” mentioned throughout the filing.

So part of the primary IPO proceeds is already spoken for: it’s going toward the tax bill created when those awards settle.

At a reported $16 billion valuation on $1.42 billion of trailing revenue, Oura would come public at roughly 11.3x sales.

The harder question is what the hell you compare it to.

Whoop is probably the closest business-model comp. It also pairs screenless hardware with a recurring subscription, although it skews much more heavily toward fitness. Its latest private financing valued the company at $10.1 billion.

Garmin is where you end up if investors decide Oura is mostly a hardware company. Garmin trades around seven times revenue, but it also has a 26% operating margin, decades of history, and a much broader product portfolio.

And then there’s Peloton, which is the cautionary tale nobody from Oura is going to put in the roadshow deck. Hardware plus subscription looked fantastic until net new hardware demand stopped growing.

That’s really the bet here.

If Oura gets valued like premium consumer hardware, 11x revenue looks rich. If investors buy the argument that the ring is really the acquisition channel for a high-margin, highly retentive health platform, you can start to understand how they get there.

This is an unusually good consumer hardware business because the hardware itself has attractive gross profit and pays back acquisition upon purchase, while the subscription that sits behind it earns an 89% gross margin with low churn.

The catch is that Oura has had real hardware-quality problems, is becoming increasingly exposed to a concentrated retail channel, and is currently reinvesting almost all of the operating leverage created by its growth.

None of this is financial advice. It is for informational purposes only. I write this post-kids-birthday-party in a post-Chinese-food coma.”

Wishing you trade at a high revenue and EBITDA multiple,

CJ