In June 2024, Oura announced that women now make up the majority of its user base for the first time. The company had sold 2.5 million rings, and the demographic shift wasn't accidental - it was the direct result of "continued investment in women's health", as the company put it back then.
Oura had been building toward this for years. The Natural Cycles partnership in 2022 enabled FDA-cleared birth control through passive temperature tracking. Cycle Insights came in late 2023. Pregnancy Insights in March 2024.
But the June 2024 announcement was different. It wasn't about launching another feature. It was about revealing that the strategy had worked. Women's health wasn't a niche use case anymore - it was driving majority adoption.
That was the inflection point. Not just for Oura, but for the entire category.
The validation became even more concrete this week, when Oura raised over $900 million at an $11 billion valuation - one of the largest funding rounds in wearables history. The company reported it had sold more than 5.5 million rings, with over half of those sales occurring in the past year alone, and is on track to surpass $1 billion in annual sales in 2025.
The last couple of months have been busy ones in the world of wearables. Ultrahuman acquired viO HealthTech for clinically validated ovulation tracking. Oura expanded partnerships with Maven, Progyny, Midi Health, and Evernow. Both companies launched blood testing integrations. WHOOP rolled out enhanced hormonal health features and its own lab testing platform. Ultrahuman partnered with Clue for cycle tracking.
In August, the US International Trade Commission ruled that Ultrahuman and RingConn infringed on Oura's form factor patents, banning both from one of the largest markets.
These aren't isolated announcements. They're symptoms of a land grab to become the foundational infrastructure layer for women's health data.
What Everyone Realized at Once
Oura's announcement from June 24 proved that women's health features aren't a niche add-on - they're the primary driver of adoption in the smart ring category. And once that became clear, every company started racing toward the same destination.
The pattern is remarkably consistent: passive biometric tracking + blood testing + clinical care integration + specialized algorithms for fertility, pregnancy, and menopause.
Blood testing isn't just another feature. It's infrastructure. Oura launched Health Panels, analyzing 50 biomarkers through Quest Diagnostics. Ultrahuman expanded Blood Vision to the UK and UAE. WHOOP introduced Advanced Labs with the same model.
The fact that all three moved into blood testing within mere weeks suggests this isn't about differentiation. It's about building a complete data layer. Continuous biometrics show what's happening day-to-day. Periodic blood work shows what's happening underneath. Together, they create longitudinal health profiles no single data source can match.
The Land Grab Dynamic
Women's health data has network effects. The more comprehensive your data (continuous tracking + periodic labs + clinical context), the more valuable your insights become. The longer you track someone, the better you understand their baseline and can detect meaningful changes.
First-mover advantages matter here. Once a woman has two years of cycle data, sleep patterns, and biometric trends in one platform, switching costs are high - not just the subscription, but the accumulated context she'd lose.
This is why the next 12-18 months matter. The companies that can assemble the full stack during this period will be very difficult to displace later.
The patent dispute adds urgency. The ITC ruling in August removed two major competitors from the US market at exactly the moment when the category is gaining mainstream traction.
Ultrahuman's response has been aggressive: opening a Texas manufacturing facility to potentially route around import restrictions, expanding rapidly internationally, and continuing to add features and partnerships. But the timing still matters - it's harder to participate in the land grab when you're locked out of the US market.
Four Different Bets on the Same Future
Oura's play is clinical partnerships first. Maven and Progyny for fertility and pregnancy. Midi Health and Evernow for menopause. Scripps Research collaboration on pregnancy outcomes. Peanut integration for postpartum sleep tracking. Oura is systematically building relationships across every stage of women's health, positioning the ring as the hardware layer underneath an expanding care delivery network.
The Natural Cycles partnership in 2022 established the template - integrate with best-in-class providers rather than building everything in-house. Oura doesn't need to become a fertility company or a menopause company. It needs to become the hardware layer those companies integrate with.
Ultrahuman's play is technical precision plus catching up fast. The viO acquisition brought 15 years of clinically validated fertility algorithms and data from 260,000 cycles. The Cycle & Ovulation Pro feature claims over 90% accuracy for ovulation confirmation, specifically designed for women with irregular cycles - the population most underserved by traditional tracking. Ultrahuman saw where Oura was going with women's health and moved to close the gap.
WHOOP's approach is less focused specifically on women's health, but follows the same infrastructure logic. Hormonal Insights integrates menstrual cycle data with existing performance metrics. Advanced Labs uses the same model - Quest partnerships, comprehensive biomarker panels, AI-powered insights. WHOOP is building toward comprehensive health management, with women's health as one increasingly important pillar.
Movano tried a fourth approach: women's health as the core positioning from day one. The Evie Ring launched in early 2024 explicitly as "the first smart ring designed specifically for women's health." But execution stumbled - battery issues, syncing problems, devices that stopped working. The open ring design meant to accommodate finger swelling caught on clothing and hair.
By the time Movano pulled back, fixed the issues, and relaunched in September 2024, the market had shifted. Oura had validated women's health as core to the entire category. Ultrahuman eventually acquired top-notch fertility tracking capabilities. The choice wasn't between general wearables and women's health-specific devices anymore - everyone was building women's health features into their sophisticated platforms.
The lesson: Women's health positioning works, but the execution bar is extremely high and the window is narrow.
The Platform That's Assembling Itself
In August, I wrote a piece for this newsletter called "The Women's Health OS That Will Never Be." The premise was straightforward - a comprehensive operating system for women's health makes sense but faces insurmountable barriers. Regulatory complexity, fragmented business models, privacy concerns post-Dobbs, misaligned incentives.
I concluded that the vision would remain just that - a vision.
I may have been wrong about how it arrives.
What we're watching isn't a designed system being built from the top down. It's a platform assembling itself:
- Natural Cycles integration = birth control & fertility layer
- Maven/Progyny = fertility and pregnancy layer
- Midi/Evernow = menopause layer
- Clue = cycle tracking layer
- Quest/blood testing = diagnostic layer
- Peanut = postpartum layer
No single company is building the full stack vertically. Instead, they're racing to become the hub - the infrastructure that sits between women and every other health service they need.
The ring is the wedge. It's the only health device most women wear 24/7. It's passive, collecting data without requiring action. And increasingly, it's becoming the persistent identity layer for women's health - the place where all the other data flows together.
This is the platform play the wearables companies are pursuing. They aren't trying to become comprehensive women's health platforms themselves. They're trying to become the essential layer that every other platform needs to integrate with.
So Who Wins?
Oura is likely in the strongest position right now - and just secured the resources to stay there with this week's $900 million raise. They have the largest installed base, patent protection that just removed two competitors from the US market (for now), the most extensive network of clinical partnerships, and credibility from sustained investment in women's health.
But strongest position doesn't mean guaranteed victory. The question isn't just who has the best technology or the most partnerships - it's also about what women actually want and trust.
The differentiator might not be features at all:
Trust and data privacy. Post-Dobbs, women are acutely aware of the risks of centralized reproductive health data. The company that provides integrated insights while giving users real control over their data might win on that basis alone.
Clinical credibility versus consumer accessibility. There's a tension between being good enough for healthcare use (which requires validation, FDA engagement, clinical partnerships) and being easy enough for everyday wellness (which requires consumer-friendly UX, affordable pricing, low friction). Different companies are solving this differently.
The ecosystem you're already in. If you're using Natural Cycles, Oura makes sense. If you're working with a fertility clinic that integrates with Ultrahuman, that becomes your default. The winner might be determined less by the ring itself and more by which ecosystem you're already invested in.
My read: Oura has 12-18 months to consolidate before the market stabilizes. They're using that time to sign clinical partnerships and deepen integrations. But the patent protection is temporary, international markets remain contested, and ultimately, women will choose based on what matters most to them - whether that's accuracy, partnerships, privacy, or simply which device their doctor or friend recommends.
In the end the winner might not be the company with the best ring. It might be the company that becomes so deeply embedded in clinical workflows and so trusted with longitudinal data that switching becomes unthinkable.
That's the race that's really happening. Not for sales this quarter, but for position in the infrastructure stack that's assembling itself right now.
