ŌURA was founded in Finland over 10 years ago with one goal in mind: to help people live healthier lives. More than a decade later, we continue to be committed to that ambitious vision each day as we build and evolve our product experience to impact lives for the better, helping foster healthy habits and making preventative care a daily practice.
A person’s health is the product of the combination of countless factors, including family history, environmental conditions, activity, lifestyle and habits, and more. And no two people are the same. When we think about Oura as a “personalized health companion,” we imagine a piece of hardware technology, combined with advanced algorithms and continuous biometric data, that understands you and can help you make the right lifestyle choices and changes to achieve optimal health, whatever that means for you. It’s that simple. And it’s that hard.
While we started with sleep, over the years, we’ve expanded to include additional health pillars to provide a more complete, holistic picture of your health. Like sleep, activity, cardiovascular health, and stress & resilience, metabolic health is an integral component of health and well-being. It is a natural next dimension of the Oura Ring experience and something our customers have been asking us for.
Only 12% of Americans are considered to be metabolically healthy, and most people don’t have a clear understanding of what metabolic health is or why it matters. From a clinical perspective, metabolic health is defined as having five measurements — waist circumference, fasting blood glucose, systolic blood pressure, triglycerides, and HDL cholesterol — within a set range. Scientists have identified these measurements as being strongly indicative of future risk for developing conditions like heart disease and diabetes. There are a number of factors that can cause someone to fall into the unhealthy range for one of these criteria, including poor nutrition, insulin resistance, smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, inconsistent sleep, and chronic stress or inflammation. But like everything when it comes to our health, it’s a spectrum that can be much better understood with regular tracking and continuous data inputs.
Metabolic disease is not new, but what is new are the breakthroughs that can support metabolic health. For the first time, there are tools that can help people radically change their metabolic health, namely, continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) that are more accessible and affordable and the indisputable popularity of GLP-1 agonists. The growth of these therapeutics is a notable step toward increasing acceptance of bio-sensors in the clinical community, with med-tech, regulators, and consumers as powerful tools spanning the full spectrum, from prevention to clinical care. These tools are promising, and I’m excited to learn more about their impact as time goes on. However, the overall health outcomes are much bigger than those of one tool.
At Oura, we are uniquely positioned to enable members to make personalized decisions about their health with the help of their physicians when needed. Oura arms members and their physicians with data and tools that could aid members in adopting a healthy lifestyle in conjunction with their treatment.
Today, we’re taking a meaningful step in our journey to integrate metabolic health as a “sixth sense” of the Oura experience. I’m excited to share that we’ve entered into an agreement to acquire Veri. Veri is a personalized metabolic health company that guides people to the right foods and habits for their bodies through a CGM-enabled app. You can read the announcement for the details, but I thought I’d share a bit more with our community about this decision, including why it is so essential to moving our mission forward.
We heard from our members that metabolic health is a key area of interest. 97% of our members have expressed interest in understanding how the food they eat impacts their health. Many of our members have already experimented with a CGM device, and more than half want to. Our members tell us what they want, and we do our best to make it happen. This acquisition is a step in that direction.
Veri and Oura are aligned in many ways; we were both founded in Finland with an approach to health that draws upon the Finns’ balanced and holistic way of living. We are both mission-driven companies with lofty and ambitious goals to radically change health outcomes for people, and we believe in the role of technology in enabling that change. In fact, last year, we partnered with Veri to integrate Oura data into the Veri CGM experience so their members could see how their daily scores and biometrics impacted glucose levels, training, and daily life.
The team at Veri has deep experience in building metabolic health products, and we look forward to integrating their expertise as we continue to explore and develop new offerings in service of building the best holistic health companion.
The acquisition of Veri is one piece of our investment in metabolic health. Our ambition is to create an ecosystem of other inputs, such as CGMs, that feed into the Oura experience to make it even more personalized and actionable. Our vision puts you at the center of your own health journey and empowers you to understand the bigger picture of your health more fully, seek the right tools to support you – whether it’s support from a physician or specialist, a GLP-1 protocol or lifestyle changes –, and helps you track and monitor how those interventions are impacting your health over time.
Our first step is the introduction of Meals in Oura Labs, our opt-in innovation hub within the Oura App that allows members to test experimental features and provide feedback. Meals, available this fall, will help members track when they eat and map back to their chronotype to understand how when and what we eat can impact health metrics like sleep, stress, and recovery.
The possibilities for Oura Ring are truly limitless, and it’s been an exercise in restraint to decide which paths to pursue and which ones to hold for the future. We know that Oura has the potential to change lives at scale, and we’re passionate about our vision to make it a reality. Our goals are big and ambitious, but we know they’re possible.
Thank you to our Oura members who push us to aim higher every day. We’re grateful to be on this journey with you.
Tom