When Oura filed to go public on September 3, the numbers were not those of a gadget company: revenue for the nine months to June 30 came to 1.21 billion dollars, up 74 percent in a year, with a net profit of 60.8 million and 5 million people paying a monthly membership on top of a ring that cost them 349 dollars or more.
Two figures further down deserve more attention from gym operators than the valuation: Oura keeps 85 percent of those paying members over a 12 month window, on a weighted average, and those members open the app more than 3.5 times a day.
A ring with no coaches, no floor and no front desk, only an algorithm that reads a person every night and talks to him every morning, retains customers far better than gyms that have both and still lose about half of their new members within six months, according to research long attributed to IHRSA, now the Health and Fitness Association.
What the ring does, and what it will never do
What Oura really sells is interpretation, because once the titanium is stripped away the transaction is a daily check in from something that knows you, notices the bad night or the hard session, and adjusts what it says next; loyalty follows that interpretation rather than the hardware, and the filing prices it at 121 percent growth in membership revenue.
What the ring cannot do is look a member in the eye, change the next session on the spot, ask why the numbers look like that this week, hear that the sleepless night was a sick child rather than a training problem, or notice that someone is lying to himself about how hard he is working, and it cannot put him in a room with twelve other people pushing at the same wall, all of which a coach and a class do by instinct.
The ring wins anyway on coverage rather than quality: a coach can follow perhaps twenty members from memory while the ring follows five million, so the human loses on arithmetic, and the members who leave a gym are almost always the ones nobody was following.
What most gyms sell makes that arithmetic worse, because a traditional membership stripped to its essentials is rent, a monthly fee for square footage and machines, and a landlord's churn is a landlord's churn. Yet the people who joined a gym this year did not sign up for square footage; they want to know whether they are getting better, a plan that reacts to how they slept, and someone who notices when they disappear for two weeks.
They did not wait for the club: nearly half of US adults already own a fitness tracker or smartwatch according to the ACSM's 2026 fitness trends report, so the member arrives on the floor already wearing a Garmin, an Apple Watch, a Whoop or an Oura ring, which means the AI is already in the building and the only open question is whose side it is on.
The coach who fights the AI loses, and the one who uses it wins
There are two losing answers to that question: ignoring the wearables and continuing to rent space, or trying to out-app the ring with notifications and a feed, a contest no club wins.
The winning answer is to make the AI the coach's ally, starting with what members already wear: on the floor, live heart rate from Garmin, Apple Watch, Polar, Whoop or a Bluetooth strap drives a shared effort screen through Snap in under a minute, with a club Lightband for anyone who arrives without a device.
That screen is the club's second weapon, because a ring is a solitary experience while a class with everyone's zones on one wall is a social one, and Orangetheory built a global franchise on that idea: effort made visible to the whole room, scored on each person's own heart rate rather than physique, with a coach reading the wall and calling the next push. No algorithm on a finger can reproduce the energy of a room, and a club that puts its members' wearables on a screen owns that energy.
Between visits, recorded outdoor activities can sync from Garmin into the member's profile and, with the member's consent, sleep, resting heart rate and recovery data give the coach context for the sessions in the room; what arrives depends on the device.
The software then does the part no human can, since every morning DASH scores churn risk from attendance and training activity and ranks the whole base, so a coach knows which fifteen of 800 members need a message today, while NATE Assistant drafts that message or the next program from the member's actual data for a trainer to review before anything goes out, and NATE Coach, a separate service the club can assign, answers members' questions between sessions on that same program.
That leaves the human free to do the part the ring cannot: a member who missed his club session but logged a long outdoor run gets a conversation about the work he actually did and a plan adjusted around it instead of a generic reminder, and a poor recovery score becomes a question about the sleepless night, so that he leaves with a decision that fits his life rather than a number on a screen.
The coach who once followed twenty members from memory now follows a few hundred within the same shift, with the same data the ring has plus the judgment it lacks, which is not AI replacing the human but the human finally getting the ring's coverage, and at that point the ring loses.
The honest caveat, and why it cuts both ways
Oura's 85 percent is earned at 5.99 dollars a month on a product that cancels in two taps with no social cost, whereas club dues run ten to twenty times higher and quitting a gym feels like admitting a failure, so the comparison flatters the ring.
The price cuts the other way too, because a member paying 90 dollars a month has bought far more attention than a six dollar subscriber, and when the only individual signal he ever receives comes from the ring, the ring is delivering the premium experience and the club is delivering rent, a gap that surfaces in month seven on the cancellation form.
The ring also gets the name on the screen right: a logo alone will never earn a renewal, but when the club's app carries its own name, icon and colors, the progress review and the coach's message arrive from the club rather than from a device brand, and the loyalty finally has somewhere to land.
The AI is here to stay, on the member's finger, whether the industry likes it or not, and the ring has a head start of five million mornings; the coach has the one thing that cannot be shipped in a box and now the tools to use it at scale, so he can beat the ring, and most of the time he simply does not know it yet.
Sources
SiliconANGLE, Smart ring maker Oura files for IPO as revenue jumps 74%
Tech Times, Oura Ring Files for IPO at $16B: Sensing Tech Behind 5M Members Explained
ACSM, The Future of Fitness: ACSM Announces Top Trends for 2026