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Oura CEO Tom Hale weighs in on the brand's products, partnerships and competition

When the idea for the Oura Ring was first spawned in 2013, the company’s founders envisioned a device that would take a precise look at sleep and recovery, two important aspects of overall health that they felt few wearable tools had prioritized to that point.

Now, over a decade later, Oura’s ambitions have evolved to transform healthcare and personal health, all while disrupting the growing wearables industry.

“The vision for the future of Oura has to do with the doctor in your pocket,” Oura CEO Tom Hale said in an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday. “Everyone already has kind of a supercomputer in their pocket — everyone should have a wearable device which is monitoring them continuously that just fits into their life, and then a machine intelligence which is overlooking them to provide them preventative personal care to help them live their best and healthiest life.”

Oura, which was ranked No. 23 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has hastened its shift towards broader health monitoring through a combination of technological upgrades, product advances, fundraising, acquisitions, and the usage of AI, LLMs and analytics. That has helped the company broaden its vision from just sleep to cardiovascular health, stress & resilience, women’s health, and now nutrition and eating habits.

It also means evolving beyond tracking things just with a ring, leading Oura into new partnerships with companies like Dexcom, one of the leaders in glucose biosensing via its glucose monitor, and through features like an AI health coach and the ability to take pictures of your food and upload it into the app for nutrition breakdowns and AI-driven advice.

More coverage of the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50

While that pushes Oura further into a broader wearables category competing alongside more all-in-one devices like watches from Apple, Google and Samsung, as well as focused fitness devices from companies like Garmin and Whoop, Hale said that the rest of the category “pushes us to go further and farther ahead in creating innovations that are going to blow people’s minds.”

“We’re really focused on the things that matter that are going to change your health picture,” he said.

Hale said he believes one of the biggest competitors Oura faces is “people just not being aware of the benefits” of wearing the ring, but the company’s increased focus on overall health and wellness is resonating with consumers.

In June 2024, Oura announced that it had sold more than 2.5 million rings. Now, about a year later, Hale said the company has “roughly doubled the business, and we continue to grow.”

Hale said the company had previously announced it was going to do about $500 million in revenue last year, and this year “it’s definitely going to be a lot larger than last year.”

While that doesn’t mean an IPO is on the horizon — Hale said the company has “some catching up to do before we’re ready to be a public company” — Oura sees plenty of room ahead to continue to lean into what its ring wearers are increasingly looking for.

“We see a world where you might be using some sensor for some amount of time to learn some lesson, but the device you’re going to have on your body to monitor your sleep, your activity, your overall health [and] make predictions about your health, will be the Oura Ring,” Hale said.

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

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AI voice startup ElevenLabs pushes global expansion as it gears up for an IPO

Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.

The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.

“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.

He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.

Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.

“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”

Undecided on location

Fundraising plans

ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.

Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

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U.S. lifts chip software curbs on China amid trade truce, Synopsys says

Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.

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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday. 

“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement

The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China. 

The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

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Datadog stock jumps 10% on tech company’s inclusion in S&P 500 index

The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.

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Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.

S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.

Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.

Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.

While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.

DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.

Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.

New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook

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