Amid a wave of wearable, internet-connected gadgets—watches, glasses, pins, apparel—it’s clear that ŌURA’s bet on the smart ring is paying off. (The subscription model and an array of partnerships have certainly helped.) As the company’s sales surge and its valuation rises, what new products and markets are in the pipeline? We ask its chief executive.

Tom Hale
Chief Executive Officer, ŌURA 

Allie Garfinkle
Senior Reporter; Cochair, Fortune Brainstorm

Where Wearables Go Next

Conferences

OK, so raise your smart rings or your other wearables if you want to live a longer, healthier life here on Earth. The global wellness industry already generates more than $2 trillion and is poised to grow in this era of the quantified self. Next. Up my colleague Fortune senior finance reporter and brainstorm co-chair Ally Garfinkel will chat with Aura CEO Tom Hale, and my aura ring tells me that I'm very excited by this conversation, so please enjoy. Ali. Take it away. to be with I Hello, hello, everybody. Hi, OK, you can say hi. Hi. Hi Tom. Hi, how's it going, Allie? It's going pretty good. I am very excited to be here with you. I, as we've talked about, love the oar ring. I've worn this for 2 years. I interface with it every single day. And right now there are a lot of people like me who love this product who are very upset. There is some controversy right now over your expanded partnership with the DoD. Let's just clear the air. Let's set the record straight. What's going on here? Well, so for the record, we will never share your data with anyone unless you direct us to do it. We will never sell your data to anyone ever. There was a lot of misinformation about this. It was, you know, posted online that we were partnering with the US government to share your data, and that's just simply not true. So we spent about a week setting the record straight, and I'm glad to report that like it's sort of calmed down, died down, and the outrage has subsided. Now what about the partnership with Palantirer? Can you? Up, what exactly is going on? It's funny. I think partnership is a little bit of a strong sell. We acquired a company last year. That company had a Sas relationship, a small contract with Palantirer for something called IL-5, Impact Level 5 Security. It's basically I call it a component of their solution. That contract is still running and that news, that that relationship became blown into a massive partnership with Pallanter. We don't. We have a small commercial relationship. The systems are not connected. There's no way Palantirer has access to your data. No one in the government can see your data. No one in Pallanter can see your data, totally overblown. But not to say anything other than this is incredibly important to us because privacy and security of anyone's data, especially women's data, is central to what we, you know, protect and defend. In fact, if you've ever taken a close look at our terms of service and our privacy policy, we actually say we will oppose. any efforts to use your data for surveillance or prosecution purposes, meaning that we will, we will, we will actively oppose that, which again I'm not asking for any credit, it's just like that's just the way we approach this because it's so important to our members. Now you can clap, you can clap. You answer that question like a man who's been asked about this a lot. Yeah, I did my first TikTok, so that was your first TikTok. TikTok. That was your first experience on TikTok. It was amazing. I love the captions on TikTok and it's interesting they can cut them so closely together. Like I only did it like in 25 takes. No, only 25 takes. I love you cop. I honestly. Probably take me 30. I still haven't posted TikTok, you're ahead of me. Really quickly, how does Zora secure your data? Yeah, so look, we have a massive investment in security in terms of security team, CISO in terms of encryption. We use RSA 256 bit encryption. That's the internet standard. We use TLS 1.2 for all transport. So basically it is as secure as Anything that's out there on the internet in terms of security, but maybe more importantly, we have all of the kind of rigor that you would have as a GDPR compliant organization who's also HIPAA compliant. We basically view our data and we treat our data as, you know, personal health information, and we guard that jealously and zealously. Quite frankly, people always ask me, hey, can you See my data and tell me what's going on, I say, no, I cannot. I don't have the privilege or the right to do that. And if you authorize us, then we can have someone take a look at it, but that person is a very limited role and a limited spec inside the company. We don't look at people's data. That's just you can't do that. Now I said your data very specifically because it's your data. You're an aura ring where hand raise. Who here has an aura ring? Yeah, it's a pretty good presence. Yeah, I was going to say, how do you feel about how do you feel about that? That's solid solid. Who here has another wearable? OK, interesting. How competitive is the wearables marketplace right now? I mean, the wearables market is pretty interesting. It's heated up. Honestly, I think Aura's done a lot to bring this market to a new audience, and that audience is women, you know, obviously the ring form factor lends itself to sort of fitting into your life. It's more comfortable. You can wear it at night. It doesn't, you know, bleep or blurt or vibrate or try and disturb. But it also is something you can wear with any kind of, you know, outfit and feel like it's pretty inconspicuous. You're not shouting at brainstorm tech. You're not wearing an iPhone on your wrist. You're not wearing a big muscly, you know, kind of watch that says I hunt or I hike or I bike, you know, it's a statement that's a little bit more subtle. I think we've really opened that up, and I think for those of you who don't follow the wearables market as closely as I might, you know, our business has Been literally at hyper hyper growth. The wearables market's growing single digit percentages. Actually last year wrist borne wearables actually shrank. There was a shift to smaller, cheaper wrist borne wearables, primarily driven in India and in Asia. While ring wearables, we basically doubled in size. So we're growing at north of 100%. So I think in terms of wearables what's interesting is We've actually brought in a new era of health as opposed to being fitness. Wearables 1.0 was like, did you get your steps in? Wearables 2.0 is, you know, did you understand what happened with an ECG on your wrist when you saw it? Wearable 3.0 is continuous monitoring. Tracked overnight. Why is that important? It's important because your body's at rest and goes through a predictable cycle, so we can see differences night over night that are instructive. If night overnight we see your respiration is elevated by 0.5 a beat per minute or your temperature is elevated by 0.5 a degree or your heart rate variability and heart rate are are are shifting, we can probably say with some high degree of confidence that you're on the brink of either strain or stress that may result in illness. And we've seen this actually. It's a feature of or called Symptom radar. We have, but we have people on TikTok saying, you know, I, I learned that I had appendicitis from Symptom radar. I thought it was a pain. I wasn't sure. My family said don't go to the doctor. We don't go to the doctor, and I just You know what, Ara's telling me to go, and I went, and it turns out I was 24 hours away from a bad, you know, a bad incident. People have gone to TikTok and talked about finding out that they had cancer, lymphoma. This is just fascinating because what we're doing is we're inverting the paradigm for health. Instead of it being interventionist health, it's preventionist. Instead of being after the fact, you're sick and we're going to try and cure you, it's, let's predict before you get sick. Let's try and help you avoid that sickness altogether. It's just a very different approach and it's enabled by the fact that the ring on this side on the human body is the most accurate place to measure. When you go to the hospital, who's been to the hospital? I hope none of you, but when they measure, where do they put the sensor on the back of your wrist? No, no, they don't. They put a sensor on the tip of your finger. Why? Well, because of arterial blood flow, your heart pumps, shoots straight down your arm. This is the first stop. Second thing, uniform tissue 2 millimeters away from the sensor, so you're actually able to see information in that signal that. Just don't see here. Think of the signal here as like a sign curve. Think of the signal here. It looks like a heart rate, right, the sort of double peaks that we all know is what a heart rate looks like. The information that's encoded in that incredibly powerful. So that has to do with the location of where you measure. Now I was explaining to Tom before this that he has the blessing and the curse of me being a zealous user of this product. I actually turned off the symptom radar. It was a little too much information for me on days when I hadn't slept enough. It was sort of telling me, you maybe have symptoms, and I was like, I know, I probably have the symptoms of being stressed. So how do you balance The right amount of data. How do you decide on features? How do you figure out what needs to be toggled on and off? How do you balance? How do you balance all of that? One of the things that I think has been really interesting to see is the dispersion of the kinds of customers that we have. So we have marathon runners who are training for their marathon and optimizing for performance. We have people who are chronically ill who are trying to minimize the number of steps that they take in a day so they don't have a flare up of their pots or chronic fatigue syndrome or long COVID. We have young mothers who are, you know, trying to get pregnant a second time. We have, we have old people who are trying to age gracefully, and that dispersion of users and the sort of variety of people in their approach to their data has forced us to be sort of scalable in the UI. So if you want to go all the way deep, all the way down to the detailed data, you can. But you know at the top level we're going to give you a score and an insight, and that insight could be something like, hey, take it easy today. You know your biometrics are in need of recovery, like take it easy, and that that trust and that instruction that we provide for people is simple and easy to consume. If you want to double click, you want to go deeper, you can't. That's really the key. And honestly, I think again that's a little bit what sets us apart from other wearables because most wearables are there to both tell you what's going on with some kind of metric, but they don't give you the. Text about how that's changing over time. They tell you about this moment, not your entire life, and so we're inverting the paradigm. You're in charge of your health journey. We're going to give you the information. You can choose to embrace it. You can choose to ignore it, but we're not going to try and like shame you or anything. We're going to support you through whatever your health journey is. Now start preparing some questions for Tom because I know you have them. Quick question about AI because it wouldn't be 2025 unless we talked about AI. Meantime to AI. 8, yeah, yeah, along along. Tell me, tell me about where AI fits into Aura's future. So we've always been an AI forward company and that's because all the algorithms that we use to generate the values and the insights, that's all AI. Now where we've been headed is actually this idea of the doctor in your pocket. Our vision is simple. Everyone should have a device on their body that provides clinical grade data. Everyone already has a supercomputer they keep in their pocket. They pay too much attention to it. There should be some. Machine intelligence layer which is overlooking you from a preventative or interventionist health perspective. Call it the doctor in your pocket. That's the vision and that's where we've been headed. We've taken steps in that direction with something called the advisor. Interestingly, apropos of the last session two before us. The really interesting thing is that what we see is that people who talk to the advisor, first of all, women talk to it more than men, really more frequently, twice as long. Really interesting. Second thing is this. the conversations always end on a trajectory which is, hey, how, tell me a little bit about this about my body. Hey, what's going on? Oh, let me tell you what's going on in my life. And then let me ask you a question about what's going on in my life. What's really fascinating is that does it try to get into therapy. It turns into I'm kidding you not. This is really amazing. When we interviewed women customers, we said, so why do you use the advisor? And they said, Well, we use the advisor because it's an infinitely empathic. Infinitely patient partner who understands intimately my physiology, and it's always there for me. And then they said, and we said, well, what feature would you like us to add to it? And they said, can you allow us to name it whatever name we want to name it? And I Right, because what what this was saying is that for some people, not everybody, but for some people, this kind of like intimate partner in your health journey, super valuable relationship, which makes sense. Think about your coach, think about your doctor, think about your OBGYN. Think about whoever's giving you advice about your health, and if you trust them, that's incredibly powerful. What would you name yours? Uh, Karen, Karen, my wife's name, so you know, I'm going to go with that. Questions for Tom. Yes, right over here we have a mic coming your way. That hand went up fast, so I'm very curious what you have to say. Thank you, fascinating conversation. I'm an ardent user of, of the ring, as you can see. Uh, my name is Sati. I run tech for the largest digital bank in the US, Allied Financial. Part of my responsibility is cybersecurity. So we have multiple attacks every day, and I can correlate the stress that this shows to what my job is. What I'm asking is, is there a way for you to overlay the job that we do? To people that are wearing the rings and normalize it. So I'm not like worried about all the stress because it's constantly thinking that I'm stressed, but I love that about my job. Yeah, I mean, the reality is that the technology doesn't lie. If your heart rate is elevated, if your temperature is elevated, if you're, you know, think of all the things that we use for stress, which is temperature, heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiration. If those things happen, you're stressed, you're physiologically stressed, and for us to sort of say, well, you're not, it's OK, it would sort of undercut, I think, the objective truth, which is that your body is responding to stress and providing a stress response. The way we think about it is that stress actually isn't bad. And what you're trying to solve for maybe particularly in your case is resilience, and this is what we try and measure. We try and measure your response and your recovery from stress within a day, because actually stress is not bad. Actually think about it. How do you get stronger? You go to the gym, you stress your muscles and your muscles get stronger, and then you have more endurance and more strength. It's the same thing with stress resilience. So we want to help you build more resilience because your job, by the way, sounds terribly stressful. And I don't know if we can help you with that other than suggesting that you change jobs, which I don't think you're interested in doing, and I don't think we're going to take that that picture, that posture with you, but what we can do is tell you what's happening in your physiology from, you know, minute to minute so that you can make the best decision because, you know what, if you're making a critical decision, you want to be at the peak of your performance, not at the bottom of it. Yes. Thanks Tom and Ali. Vanqui nanoware. Um, Tommy, you said something that I think is resonate with a lot of us, Gen one of wearables, gen 2, gen 3. how do you see the business model evolving? Um, maybe I'm making a more controversial statement, but it's not always going to be consumer driven. We're going to hit a ceiling of who's going to actually purchase this. So how are you thinking about moving into And I also hate saying this word traditional healthcare because we know that that's broken through a payer market, but I imagine you're thinking about those things and then would love a comment on one thing that I think you did amazing that others didn't or have not yet and are following suit is data partnerships with other wearables. wearables come like this is mine, nobody gets it, and you did something really special with Dexcom and just I think it'd be great for the audience here. I think it's, it's a great point. First of all, the evolution of wearables, I think the most important thing that we can do as a company is help provide access. Because if we're going to change the trajectory of human health, like we can't just have, you know, whatever 15-20% of this audience is a very elite audience have it. So for us, the way we think about the traditional healthcare model is that actually it's about providing access and whether that comes from government support or it comes from an insurer, we partnered with Medicare Advantage to provide rings to their patients, to the lives that they cover. We're Thinking very hard about how we provide access, and I think that's probably the right way to think about it, because if we are the baseline for your health and we can see deviations from that baseline, we're furthest upstream from a problem and your problem is your problem, but it's also ultimately going to become some healthcare system or some healthcare that's funded by the government's problem. We want to, we want to help avoid that as much as possible. So the second question which is how does it evolve? I think actually the thing is is that there's not going to be one wearable that's going to solve for everything. It'd be really cool if there was one ring to rule them all, but we know practically that's not true. I'm wearing a Dexcom sensor right now. That's because it's the most reliable and the highest quality blood glucose data that I can get. It's integrated with my aura experience so that it knows that, you know, if I'm stressed or if I haven't slept or if I'm, if I exercise. How to adjust and how to correlate my blood sugar based on that so I know how I'm performing. I think that's going to be true across a wide range of wearables, whether it's metabolic, maybe it's, you know, blood pressure, maybe it's activity, maybe it's other things, maybe it's, you know, other kinds of metrics that are going to be brought together. So I believe very much that we'll see a cloud of wearables and the choice of those wearables will be relevant to the clinical use you're trying to put it to. And that cloud, I think, will probably depend on something that's looking at you over the long term. We think that's probably a ring because of the form factor and the comfort and the properties that allow it to be a longitudinal wearable with some kind of session wearable says, Oh, you don't look like you have cardio metabolic problems. Problems. I'm just going to say that right now. Congrats. But if you did, right, and you wore a blood glucose monitor for 2 for 2 weeks or for 4 weeks, that would be a session where we'd want to see, well, what's the intersection of your long term health trajectory with what's going on with you right now? And I think that's how it's going to play out. Tom, we're almost at time. Do you want to play a quick game with me? I don't know. I I I don't, you know, I don't know if you have a choice now. You're stuck here. You're stuck here unfortunately, word association game. I'm going to give you a word and the first thing that comes to your mind, you just say whatever it is. This has never gone wrong, almost never, never. All right, first word wearable Aa AI optimist. AI Tom Hill, thank you so much. Thank you very much. Stay healthy, everybody.