Oura Postponed Its IPO, and Now It's Buying an AI Clinic for 625 Million Dollars: the Finnish Smart Ring Wants to Be Your Family Doctor Too

Finland's Oura, the best-known maker of smart rings, announced it is buying Counsel Health, a primary-care startup built around artificial intelligence, for 625 million dollars. The deal comes just weeks after Oura indefinitely postponed its stock market listing, in which it planned to raise up to 2.2 billion dollars. The explanation at the time was "uncertainty in the IPO market". For buying things, evidently, there is no uncertainty.

Counsel combines a medical chatbot with access to licensed doctors. Since June the service has been built into the Oura app: the user asks the AI, gets advice tailored to them and, when needed, talks to a real doctor. Now the two companies want to go further - into preventive, acute, specialist and chronic care. Oura's boss, Tom Hale, puts it in marketing language: members "understand their physiology", and with Counsel they can also act on it, "from quick questions and prescriptions to lab results, chronic care and referrals".

Why now? For years Oura has had the smart ring market almost to itself, but competitors RingConn and Ultrahuman are chipping away at that position and pushing the company to offer something new. When anyone can copy the ring, is the real value in the doctor on the other side of the app?

Oura's numbers are not bad. Revenue in the quarter to 30 September jumped 153 percent to 533 million dollars, and for fiscal 2026 it is around 1.75 billion dollars, 92 percent more than the previous year. In October 2025 the company raised 900 million dollars at a valuation of 11 billion dollars. Counsel, for its part, has a 25-million-dollar Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and GV behind it, and around 36 million dollars in total according to PitchBook. The 625-million price is more than seventeen times everything the startup has raised.

Counsel's CEO, Muthu Alagappan, becomes Oura's chief clinical AI officer, and 70 employees come with him. "We built medical AI around trust, safety and accountability, with doctors involved in clinical decisions," he says. Sounds good. But it means the data on your pulse, sleep and temperature will sit in the same company as your prescriptions and diagnoses. The deal is due to close by the end of 2027. Will any regulator ask by then who exactly gets to see that data?