ourathe company behind a wearable health-tracking ring, announced Tuesday that it had bought digital identification startup Proxy in an all-stock deal.
Proxy offers digital identity technology that aims to replace keys, cards, ID cards, apps and passwords. The startup said it is working to offer its offerings on both portable devices and phones.
Accordingly reporting from Bloomberg, the deal is valued by Proxy at $165 million. The company’s team, including its founders, will join Oura.
“This deal expands ŌURA’s leadership in healthcare wearables and underscores our ambition to integrate digital identity technology into our existing hardware and software offerings,” CEO Tom Hale said in a statement. “We are very excited to be working with the innovative Proxy team to expand our addressable market and pave the way for new opportunities in areas such as payments, access, security, identity and beyond, fueling future growth.”
THE BIGGER TREND
Founded in Finland in 2013, Oura offers a health and fitness tracking ring that monitors sleep and activity. The latest version of the wearable, the Oura Ring Generation 3 was released in 2021 with a new design comes last year.
About a year ago, the company announced that it had closed an “oversubscribed” round of funding that boosted its valuation $2.55 billion. Also, the company recently launched an offer for employers and partnered with Natural Cycles, a birth control app.
As part of the collaboration, customers can use the Oura Ring to track their body temperature instead of manually measuring it every morning. Natural Cycles uses temperature data and menstrual cycle information to determine a user’s fertile window and prevent pregnancy.
In the acquisition announcement, Oura said that protecting health data is another part of the proxy deal. Concerns about reproductive health information have become a hot topic following the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
“As the healthcare landscape evolves with the development of new technologies, encryption and digital identity will be critical to enabling cross-industry data protection for a frictionless security experience,” COO Michael Chapp said in a statement.
