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Oura files S-1: membership revenue up 121% at 89% margin/Oura files S-1: membership revenue up 121% at 89% margin/Oura files S-1: membership revenue up 121% at 89% margin/Oura files S-1: membership revenue up 121% at 89% margin/
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Wearables · Sep 4, 2026 · 4 min read

Oura Filed for Its IPO. The Monthly Subscription Is the Story.

Oura filed its S-1 on September 3. Hardware brought in $974M at a 55% blended gross margin. The membership line brought in $240M at 89%, and it grew 121%. The $16B target is priced off the second number.

Alice covers growth, retention and technology for fitness and wellness operators at The Run Rate.

Editorial collage with the OURA wordmark at the centre on torn paper, surrounded by black-and-white cutouts of a smart ring and a trading floor, with a large yellow 89% numeral.
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$240.5M
Membership revenue, up 121% year over year
89%
Gross margin on the membership line
5.0M
Paid members, doubled in twelve months

Oura filed its S-1 with the SEC on September 3, after submitting confidentially back in May. It plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker OURA and raise up to $3 billion, against a reported valuation target near $16 billion.

The headline numbers are strong. For the nine months ended June 30 2026, revenue was $1.21 billion, up 74% from $697.6 million. Net income was $61 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $107 million. A hardware company that ships a physical product and still books positive net income is rare enough on its own.

But the number that explains the valuation sits further down the page. Hardware revenue was $974 million. Membership revenue was $240.5 million. Hardware carries a blended gross margin of about 55%. The membership line carries 89%.

That is the whole filing, in two figures.

The subscription line is doing the work

Membership revenue grew 121% year over year, from $109 million to $240.5 million. Paid members went from 2.5 million to 5.0 million in twelve months. Hardware grew about 65% over the same period, which is excellent, and still only half the rate of the subscription attached to it.

Run the arithmetic and the per-member number is small. $240.5 million over nine months, against a base that grew from 2.5 million to 5.0 million, implies somewhere between $6 and $8 per member per month. We are estimating there: Oura does not disclose a monthly average and the member base roughly doubled across the period, so the denominator moves underneath you. Oura's published membership price is $5.99 a month.

Six dollars. At 89% margin. Five million times over.

ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) in the fitness industry usually gets discussed as a membership problem, where the only lever is raising the headline price. Oura's filing describes a different shape: a small monthly number that almost nobody bothers to cancel, attached to a purchase the member already made.

Why does a wearable IPO matter for gyms and studios?

Because it puts a price on the thing most operators give away. Oura's $5.99 subscription earns more per dollar than its $349 ring, and public markets are being asked to value the company on that basis. Any gym or studio running a recovery room, a nutrition plan, an app tier or a PT package is sitting on the same structure: a low-price recurring service, high margin, sold to somebody already inside the building. Most operators file it under upsell. Oura's S-1 files it under asset.

The hardware is buying distribution

We wrote in July that Garmin didn't kill WHOOP, it killed the hardware margin. Oura's filing makes the same argument from the other side of the table. The ring is how you acquire a subscriber. The subscription is what gets valued.

HardwareMembership
Revenue, 9 months to Jun 30 2026$974M$240.5M
Growth, year over year~65%121%
Gross margin~55% blended89%
Renews itselfNoYes

The row operators should sit with is the last one.

Early investors appear to agree about where the value sits. Reporting on the filing says roughly $1 billion was taken off the table through secondary sales before the public S-1 landed.

What the filing does not settle

Oura is asking public markets to underwrite the accuracy of its data at the same time it is defending that data in court. We covered the sleep accuracy lawsuit in August, and an S-1 is precisely where a company has to write its risks down in plain language. If you are building programming, coaching or retention on member ring data, the company supplying it now carries a disclosure obligation about how good that data actually is.

It also does not settle whether the subscription holds. Five million paid members is a doubling, not a cohort curve, and the filing does not give us one. Oura's structural advantage is that the hardware sits on the member's finger all day, which is a far stronger reminder than an app icon. That advantage a studio can copy in kind, though not in form.

The operator move

Price your recurring service separately from your membership and watch what happens to it. Most operators bundle recovery, nutrition or app access into a tier and never learn what any single piece is worth on its own. Oura has spent five years learning exactly that, and the answer came back worth more than the hardware.

If your add-on tier cannot survive being priced on its own, it was never a product. If it can, it is probably the highest-margin line in the business, and you are giving it away to defend a membership price you are afraid to raise. Eli Lilly worked this out a year ago when it bought a piece of Oura. The ring was never the point.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much revenue does Oura make from subscriptions?
$240.5 million in membership revenue for the nine months ended June 30 2026, up 121% from $109 million the year before. That is against $974 million in hardware revenue over the same period, so subscriptions are roughly 20% of the top line and a much larger share of gross profit, at an 89% margin versus about 55% blended on hardware.
What valuation is Oura targeting in its IPO?
Reporting around the S-1 puts the target near $16 billion, with a raise of up to $3 billion on Nasdaq under the ticker OURA. The company filed publicly on September 3 2026 after a confidential submission in May.
What should a gym or studio operator take from Oura's filing?
That a low-price recurring service sold to an existing customer can be worth more than the product that acquired them. Oura's $5.99 monthly membership runs at an 89% gross margin across 5 million members. Most operators bundle their equivalent services into a membership tier and never price them separately, so they never find out what they are worth.
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