Oura’s Latest Acquisition Will Help Users Track Their Metabolic Health
Metabolic health is top of mind at Oura.
On Wednesday, the company said it was buying Veri, a personalized metabolic health company that employs continuous glucose monitors to share insights.
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This marks the company’s second acquisition, as it also acquired digital identification tech company Proxy in May 2023. This announcement comes on the heels of other launches, including the brand’s beta AI-based wellness coach Oura Advisor, which launched in July, and its cardiovascular health-tracking features, which launched in May. Oura, which is available in 1,232 Target doors, did not disclose details of the deal.
Veri had partnered with Oura prior to the deal.
“[Veri] ingested Oura data to present it to their users, so that their users could see, if there was a glucose spike, what the impact of exercise or sleep timing [was],” said Oura chief executive officer Tom Hale.
Hale added of Veri: “What I felt matched Oura well was this balance between information and insight.”
Coincidentally, Oura and Veri are also both Finnish companies. With Veri on board, Oura will enhance its focus on metabolic health, which is a top concern for customers — 97 percent of Oura users are interested in how food consumption affects overall health. Specifically, users will be able to implement a continuous glucose monitor in their routine to receive additional data and insights around their metabolic health in the Oura app.
With this in mind, Oura users have expressed interest in using continuous glucose monitors. According to a survey, 13 percent of users had tried one and 53 percent were interested in using one. Additionally, while they have required a prescription in the U.S., continuous glucose monitors are becoming increasingly accessible. For example, Abbott and Dexcom have both recently introduced continuous glucose monitors that are available over-the-counter.
“With this over-the-counter adoption, we’re going to see this space warm up a lot because the price has come down. The barrier to get it has come down. That’s going to bring more people to the category, more awareness of glucose health and metabolic health,” Hale said. “It’s going to be a pretty exciting time in the next 12 months.
“There’s lots of room in this space, and I think it’s going to get bigger,” he said.
Following an initial focus on sleep and expansion into women’s health, cardiovascular health and stress and resilience, metabolic health is the next focus area for Oura.
The company will roll out a “meals” feature this fall that allows users to track meals and their impact on health data.
“Meals is a way for you to log meals as part of your experience,” Hale said. “You take a photograph of a meal. It’ll keep the photograph. It’ll do some analysis of what’s in the meal. It’ll obviously record the timing and start to look for correlations.”
With the acquisition of Veri and optional implementation of a continuous glucose monitor, Oura is also expanding how it is acquiring data.
“Our goal is to have a broad range of biometrics from a wide range of sensors, some of which we will own and some of which partners will own and deliver,” Hale said, noting that not every user will employ every sensor. “Our job is to bring that data together and make sense of it.”
According to an Oura statement, Veri’s users will be “supported” through the end of 2024, after which there will be a clear transition to use Oura.
“We’re going to sunset the Veri standalone app. We’ll make sure that we have a migration pathway,” Hale said. “We’re going to take our time to do that so people [aren’t] going to get cut off. We’ll fade out over a course of time.”
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