More people are waking up to Oura.
Oura Health, which makes a ring that tracks sleep, fitness and other health measures, has been gaining users who want to gauge and optimize their sleeping patterns.
This week, the company said it sold 2.5 million devices last year, an amount equal to nearly half of all its sales since 2015. It expects to generate $1 billion in sales this year. In its latest funding round, the company — founded in Finland in 2013 — was seeking a valuation of nearly $11 billion, according to Bloomberg.
The latest-generation of rings starts at $350, and the app to gauge sleep, activity and “readiness” is another $70 per year.
Particularly popular among the executive set, the ring is attractive for its promise to “optimize your life,” as Tom Hale, Oura’s chief executive, put it in a recent interview.
The chunky ring has appeared on the fingers of the tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Dell, the actress-entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.
David Risher, the chief executive of Lyft, has been wearing a black Oura ring on the middle finger of his right hand for about a year. The information he has received from it has led to his drinking less and sleeping a bit more. If, at the end of the day, “I’ve gotten a low score,” he said in an interview, “tonight I don’t get to read because I’ve got to sleep a little more.”
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The post The C.E.O. Who Spends All Day Thinking About Sleep appeared first on New York Times.
