It turns out there is a way for a foreign company to make it in Donald Trump’s Washington.
Oura rings are on fingers from the Pentagon to Capitol Hill, tracking everything from sleep quality to fertility. Their Finnish maker’s success stems from design savvy and good timing, but also shrewd attention to the way politics works in the capital.
The company in the last year has hired top lobbying shops with links to the administration and Republican lawmakers in Congress, boosting its lobbying spend from $40,000 in 2024 to more than $1 million a year. As the winter Olympics begin in Italy, it’s handing out $349 Oura rings to Team USA. And it’s got a message that resonates: The rings are a solution to systemic health care challenges no one has been able to fix, ranging from physician shortages to ballooning federal spending.
It’s paying off. The Defense Department, Oura’s largest customer, now provides rings to certain soldiers and civil servants as an employee benefit. In Congress, they are a hot accessory for representatives and senators as different as Bronx Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Idaho Falls Republican Mike Crapo. Besides buying the rings, lawmakers have gone to bat to protect Oura from Chinese and Indian competitors. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made wearables like the Oura ring part of his Make America Healthy Again movement. He says every American should be sporting one by the end of the decade.
“It’s a status thing. It’s in the culture. It’s in the zeitgeist,” said Hunter Morgen, who served as a special assistant to Trump in his first term and now lobbies for Oura at Ballard Partners, the country’s top lobbying shop.
Oura’s popularity in Washington arrives as the company from frozen Oulu — a coastal city on the Gulf of Bothnia a seven-hour drive north of Helsinki — has jolted a sleepy market for wearables that for years was limited to wristworn devices owned by tech giants, like Google’s FitBit and the Apple watch. Last year, consumer research group Circana estimated U.S. revenue for fitness devices was up 88 percent from the previous year, with sales of smart rings up 195 percent.
The largest smart ring maker, Oura is an example of a company poised to benefit from Kennedy’s MAHA agenda to address chronic disease – a movement that has so far been skeptical of corporate influence. It also illustrates how some companies are playing offense in Washington under a Trump administration that has upended Republican free-market orthodoxy and targeted players across the health care space for their role in rising costs.
Launched on Kickstarter in 2015, Oura now controls two-thirds of the U.S. market for smart rings, according to the International Data Corporation, a technology research group. Global sales have doubled for multiple consecutive years, propelling the company to an $11 billion valuation last year, up from $2.5 billion in 2022. Now part of Europe’s small class of decacorns, startups worth at least $10 billion, Oura ranks as Finland’s most valuable startup, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
“People are, broadly written, looking for ways to have agency and to be the bus drivers of their own health care journey…We’re positioned right at the apex of all of that,” Tom Hale, chief executive of Oura, told POLITICO. The statement echoes the one Kennedy made to Congress last June when he said wearables allowed people to “take control of their own health” and declared them “key to the MAHA agenda.”
For the burgeoning digital health industry, Oura highlights the widening gap between the speed of market innovation and the ability of government policymakers to keep up, and its success raises questions about data privacy and big tech.
It is pushing for a new classification for wearable devices that would allow them to warn users of potential health problems without undergoing lengthy clearance as a medical device. It is also suing rivals like Samsung and Reebok for patent infringement, a move competitors say aims to limit the market. The complaints against Samsung and Reebok in the International Trade Commission are pending, but in filings against smaller companies so far, Oura has won.
“If you're going to make a difference in terms of the access to any technology, the story begins and maybe ends with the government,” Hale said.
“It just seemed really natural and obvious for us to start to build relationships there.”
Investing in Washington
Oura’s big push now is to convince the U.S. government to rethink what constitutes a medical device.
In a December Wall Street Journal op-ed, Hale called on the Food and Drug Administration and Congress to exempt low-risk wearables from medical grade classification, arguing “federal policy hasn’t caught up with technological devices.”
The FDA regulates wearables as either general wellness products, which face minimal oversight, or medical devices, which are subject to lengthy review and must demonstrate safety and effectiveness. Oura is arguing for the creation of a third classification, “digital health screeners,” which would allow the company to flag users about health abnormalities without a diagnosis, avoiding the medical-device approval process.
The legal gray area for wearables became apparent last year when the FDA sent a warning letter to WHOOP, another wearable company, over its blood pressure feature, arguing the WHOOP tracker had crossed into medical device territory and needed FDA approval.
Less than a month after Hale’s op-ed, the FDA revised its rules to allow wearables to inform users when a health evaluation may be beneficial and to measure blood pressure and blood sugar without going through the medical device approval process. Now, Oura is asking Congress to codify the changes and provide more clarity to companies on what claims are acceptable.
“Legislation is the preferred path where it provides additional clarity on what is allowed and what isn't allowed,” said Ricky Bloomfield, Oura’s chief medical officer, who joined last year from Apple.
Oura has invested heavily in its Washington presence in the past year, hiring lobbyists at Trump-linked lobbying powerhouse Ballard Partners, as well as lobbyists at Mayer Brown and Invariant, including Christopher Gillott, former deputy chief of staff to Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy, who chairs the Senate health committee. It also registered its first in-house lobbyist last year, hiring Walter Kuhn, who previously worked for Shopify, Apple and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).
“[Oura] has been welcome in a lot of different rooms,” said Drew Griffin, who leads Invariant’s health care practice and previously worked as chief of staff to Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio). “There’s been a lot of openness from the administration...to new ideas and new technology.”
The company has participated in White House roundtables, meets regularly with members of Congress, and signed two pledges with the Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in July to develop AI assistants as well as obesity and diabetes tools. Hale reckons he’s now in Washington once or twice a quarter.
Rep. Troy Balderson (R-Ohio), chair of the House digital health caucus and a member of the Kennedy-aligned MAHA caucus, says he’s working on the legislation Oura wants.
“This is more than just Oura ring…We just want to make sure that we have a safe environment for these wearable devices, to encourage them to expand, to allow them to be very broad and be innovative,” said Balderson, who wears a Garmin watch. His staffers prefer WHOOP bracelets and Oura rings.
WHOOP, which has more than doubled its lobbying spending, welcomed the FDA’s decision to allow new physiological metrics on low-risk wearables, but doesn’t endorse the “digital health screener” idea. “We would urge caution around creating a new, undefined regulatory category that could slow consumer access to innovation in performance and wellness,” said Alex Vannoni, vice president of health care product at WHOOP, in a statement.
Some lawmakers are concerned about the privacy implications of wearables’ rapid adoption. Last year, Cassidy introduced legislation that would hold wearable companies to data privacy standards that resemble those under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a 1996 law that protects patients from the unauthorized release of records. “Wearables empower Americans to make better health care decisions for themselves and their families. But, this innovation cannot come at the expense of patient privacy,” he wrote in a statement to POLITICO.
Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), who wears an Apple watch and has cosponsored legislation to expand coverage for wearables in health savings accounts, said Cassidy is “probably correct” to want guardrails. “There's just a ton of data that these wearables are collecting. Now the big question is: What are we doing with that data, and who owns that data?”
Rumors that Oura shared data with Palantir, a software company that makes artificial intelligence tools for the Trump administration, sparked outrage last year, prompting users to film themselves on TikTok throwing out their rings. Hale hopped on the social media platform in September to inform users the company works with Palantir through its contract with the Pentagon, but that data for regular users is private. The company has said it complies with the European General Data Protection Regulation and HIPAA standards in the U.S. for protected health information.
“Your data is yours and yours always,” Hale told users. “Nobody from Palantir or the government has access to your data.”
Ring wars
Oura is taking rivals to court for violating its intellectual property rights.
In November, it filed a complaint to the International Trade Commission, an independent agency that polices violations of U.S. intellectual property, alleging smart ring makers Samsung, Reebok, Zepp Health, and Nexxbase infringed on its patents.
The complaint marked the latest move in the company’s effort to protect its IP. In September, the ITC ruled in favor of Oura, finding India’s Ultrahuman, the second largest smart ring player in the U.S., and China’s RingConn, had violated its patents, banning their products from the country. Several companies targeted by Oura, including RingConn and French manufacturer Circular, have since signed licensing agreements with it. Nexxbase has said it will voluntarily stay out of the U.S. market for the duration of the disputed patents.
Oura’s complaint against Samsung, South Korea’s most valuable company, however, marks an escalation in the IP battle and ranks among the most contentious disputes in the wearables market to date. In 2024, Samsung filed an unsuccessful suit against Oura to preemptively block Oura from claiming Samsung’s Galaxy smart ring violates Oura’s patents. In December, Samsung filed a counter complaint at the ITC accusing Oura of patent infringement. The ITC has voted to investigate both companies’ complaints.
Samsung did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview with POLITICO in September, Mohit Kumar, the chief executive of Ultrahuman, accused Oura of trying to squelch legitimate competition. “What we are seeing play out here is…an incumbent is using whatever they can to basically block competition from the market,” Kumar said.
Members of Congress are coming to Oura’s defense. In a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in September, House MAHA caucus co-founder Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) urged Greer to enforce the ITC decision to ban Oura’s patent violators from the market, calling the abuses a “direct threat” to the U.S. economy and national security. The letter was co-signed by six other House Republicans including Balderson, Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas) and David Schweikert (R-Ariz). Schweikert and Buchanan both wear Oura rings.
“I want to encourage innovation that improves outcomes, while setting clear standards for transparency, data privacy and protection of U.S. intellectual property, the same principles that have guided leaders like Oura,” Buchanan told POLITICO in a statement.
For industry observers, the dispute between Oura and Samsung resembles the patent battle between Apple and Irvine, California, tech firm Masimo over smart watch technology. In November, a federal jury in California found Apple infringed on Masimo’s patent, requiring the iPhone maker to pay Masimo $634 million in damages. The ruling followed a verdict from the ITC in 2023, siding with Masimo in the complaint it had filed that resulted in a brief U.S. ban on some of Apple’s smart watches.
“In Apple and Masimo, the company suing was the underdog,” said Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager at the International Data Corporation. “Here it’s the opposite. It's the biggest player suing the smaller players.”
Hale dismissed accusations of trying to corner the market. “Our legal system, part of it, exists to help protect that intellectual property from people who want to exploit it.”
“There’s nothing magical about it.”
Spotify ambitions
Founded in Oulu — Finland’s fifth largest city, ten hours ahead of Silicon Valley — Oura’s origins seem uncanny. The country, however, has had a string of related successes dating back to the invention of the world’s first wearable heart monitor at the University of Oulu in the 1970s.
“We are thinking global from day one,” said Tarja Enala, who runs a program supporting health tech startups at Business Finland, the country's agency for trade and investment promotion. While Enala cautioned the industry needs more stable U.S. policy, she backed Trump’s deregulatory approach to artificial intelligence and called Kennedy’s wearables goal “great news” for the Finnish health tech sector. The U.S. is Finland’s largest export market for health technology, and the agency is sending a delegation of Finnish health and life sciences companies to New York and Boston in March.
Early investors in Oura point to its focus on sleep over fitness for its initial success. Its design also offers a technical edge over other wearables: Metrics like heart rate and blood oxygen are often measured more accurately on a finger than on a wrist.
The company got a boost in 2019 when it partnered with the Defense Department to track military readiness after the fatal Navy collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and later the USS John S. McCain in 2017, and then during the Covid-19 pandemic when a University of California San Francisco-led study found the rings detected early signs of illness, prompting NASCAR and the National Basketball Association to use them to monitor players.
But the trajectory changed under Hale, who joined in 2022 from Momentive, a software company, and steered Oura away from its focus on sleep to becoming a holistic health adviser, investing particularly in women’s health. That made the rings eligible for purchase using pre-tax flexible spending and health savings accounts in the U.S. The company has partnered with several companies including blood glucose monitor manufacturer Dexcom, which also works with Levels Health, a metabolic health company co-founded by Casey Means, Trump’s pick for surgeon general.
As of September, Oura has sold more than 5.5 million rings, with more than half of those sales coming in the last year. The company expects to reach $1.5 billion in sales this year, triple its revenue in 2024. In October, the company raised over $900 million in its Series E financing round, the most ever for a Finnish company.
Oura has expanded its footprint in the U.S., leasing a larger office in San Francisco this year and operating with an almost entirely U.S.-based leadership team. Last August, Oura announced its first U.S. manufacturing investment in Van Duyne’s district in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of its ongoing partnership with the Pentagon.
“They've asked us to create some special products for them,” said Hale, who declined to provide further details. “It was our thought that it would be best if we manufactured them in the U.S. for security reasons.”
Hale is betting on AI and expansion into new markets like the Gulf states and Japan for growth, fueling hopes in Finland that Oura could follow Spotify’s trajectory, becoming one of few Nordic startups to surpass a $100 billion valuation.
“It’s not too often that these successes emerge from Finland,” said Joni Karsikas, investment director at Tesi, a state-backed venture capital firm in Finland and one of Oura’s earliest investors.
“Hopefully we have our first $100 billion startup-based company. Maybe it is Oura. Let’s see. The ambition grows every time you succeed in something.”
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