Robinhood Becomes Underwriter for Oura's IPO
U.S. retail brokerage Robinhood will serve as one of the underwriters for the upcoming IPO of smart ring manufacturer Oura. This marks Robinhood's first participation in an IPO as an official underwriter since it was approved for IPO underwriting qualifications earlier this year.
On June 10, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev publicly announced that its brokerage, Robinhood Securities, had been approved to underwrite IPOs, moving beyond its previous role of merely distributing new shares to retail investors. He stated, "We intend to make disruptive changes in this area," and noted that industry discussions have shifted from "whether to allocate shares to retail investors" to "how much can be allocated to retail investors."
Oura officially submitted its IPO prospectus on September 3, planning to list on NASDAQ under the ticker "OURA." It had previously submitted a confidential application on May 21. The company aims to raise up to $3 billion (including cashing out for existing shareholders) and targets a valuation exceeding $16 billion, a significant increase from its valuation of about $11 billion during its last funding round in October 2025.
Financial data shows that Oura generated approximately $1.4 billion in revenue over the past 12 months as of June 30, with $1.21 billion in revenue over the past nine months, a 74% year-over-year increase. Ring hardware sales contributed $974 million, while subscription services contributed $240 million. During the same period, the company reported a net profit of $60.77 million, up from just $1.57 million in the same period last year, with an adjusted EBITDA of $107 million and a gross margin of 55%.
On the user side, Oura currently has 5 million paying members, with a conversion rate of over 94% from ring purchasers to paying members, and a 12-month retention rate of 85%. Users wear the ring for an average of 23 hours per day. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Oulu, Finland, Oura's products are available in 56 markets, and it is projected to hold about 76.4% market share in the smart ring category by 2025, with major competitors including Ultrahuman, RingConn, Samsung Galaxy Ring, and Whoop. The lead underwriting syndicate for this IPO also includes traditional investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Allen & Company, and Jefferies.
From a funding and competitive landscape perspective, Robinhood's acquisition of the underwriting position is significant not for the underwriting fees themselves (as a new underwriter, its share of fees is typically much lower than that of lead underwriters like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley), but for the voice it gains in the allocation of new shares in IPOs. Previously, Robinhood could only passively obtain a portion of allocations through its "IPO Access" channel to resell to retail users. Now, as an official underwriter, it can more actively participate in the pricing process and strive for a larger share of allocations directly for its retail customers, thereby enhancing the attractiveness of its brokerage business and trading commission revenue. Traditional investment banks are also willing to allocate some underwriting positions to Robinhood to tap into its large retail traffic and sell new shares quickly and smoothly.
Additional information: Currently, Robinhood has a market capitalization of approximately $109.8 billion, a 22.5% increase from a year ago. CEO Tenev has previously stated that he hopes the company can reach a valuation of $1 trillion in the future, calling this goal "very, very difficult" but "achievable." In addition to underwriting IPOs, Robinhood has recently been promoting tokenized stock trading and is attempting to transform from a traditional retail trading platform into a comprehensive financial platform covering trading, underwriting, and tokenized assets.
Source: Public information
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Robinhood's historical actions explain its persistence in obtaining underwriting qualifications: founded in 2013, the company gained prominence during the 2020-2021 "meme stock" trading frenzy (GameStop, AMC, etc.), but faced congressional scrutiny and multiple lawsuits for restricting user trading during the GameStop short squeeze in January 2021, damaging its reputation. Subsequently, the company expanded into cryptocurrency trading, options, and retirement accounts, and in the past two years has bet on prediction markets and tokenized stock trading. Securing IPO underwriting qualifications and landing its first deal is the latest step in its evolution from an "app for retail investors to buy stocks" to a comprehensive financial infrastructure company covering trading, underwriting, and tokenized assets.
From a capital path perspective, Robinhood chose not to acquire an investment bank to gain underwriting capabilities, but instead pursued regulatory approval to attach underwriting qualifications to its existing retail distribution network—its bargaining chip in negotiations with lead underwriters like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley is not its financial strength but its millions of retail brokerage accounts, which are a valuable distribution channel for large investment banks in the current IPO boom (besides Oura, the market is also awaiting potential mega-IPOs from SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.); for Oura, this IPO itself represents a leap in its capital path—from a valuation of about $11 billion in October 2025, it aims for a listing valuation exceeding $16 billion, driven by a 74% revenue growth rate and positive profitability.
In the industry context, this continues a decades-long narrative of discount brokerages increasingly penetrating traditional investment banking: online brokerages like Charles Schwab and E*TRADE have historically upgraded from mere trade executors to platforms providing more comprehensive capital market services through mergers or business expansion; Oura's sector of wearable devices, alongside Whoop and Apple Watch, belongs to the "quantified self" health tech category, establishing an absolute advantage in its niche with about 76% market share, and its IPO is one of the representative cases of consumer tech and health tech companies testing the public market again after the IPO winter of 2022-2023.
Structurally, this represents a reconstruction of the capital market distribution chain: traditional IPO underwriting syndicates have long been dominated by a few large investment banks managing the book-building and allocation process, but as the meme stock era has demonstrated the actual influence of retail funds on market trends, issuers increasingly want to directly reach this large and active demand pool, forcing the underwriting system to open formal positions for retail platforms like Robinhood; mechanism-wise, once a retail platform secures underwriting qualifications and successfully executes a high-profile transaction (like Oura's), it creates a demonstration effect and credibility that encourages other retail brokerages to follow suit, and compels traditional investment banks to institutionalize "retail allocation channels" from a marginal business to a regular arrangement—this is a similar story to the industry changes in the 1970s to 1990s when discount brokerages pressured full-service brokerages to lower commissions.
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