00:00Aura, the smart ring maker, has filed confidentially for an IPO in the U.S.
00:04Again, Aura, the maker of those popular smart rings that people put on,
00:07and they can gauge how much they've slept, their breath rate, their heart rate, all of that.
00:13Ed Ludlow of Bloomberg Tech joins us now with a little bit more.
00:16So is this something that people were anticipating?
00:19I mean, there's a lot of IPOs right now.
00:22We had the SpaceX filing yesterday, of course.
00:25Everyone's anticipating open AI.
00:26Was Aura supposed to be a company that was going to go public soon?
00:30Yeah, I mean, Aura's been seen as an IPO candidate.
00:32In fact, I quizzed the CEO, Tom Hale, about it in Las Vegas in January.
00:37They filed confidentially this week.
00:39According to a Bloomberg source, you have the top banks, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan,
00:45Allen & Co., Jeffries, all on this.
00:47And I think the indication from the report is that the plan is for Aura to try and go public
00:54this year.
00:55You know, they last valued about $11 billion.
00:58In the private round they closed in October gives you a sense of where they're at.
01:02You know, Whoop is a comparison to benchmark against around $11 billion, $2 billion or $10 billion in the private
01:09markets.
01:10But, you know, there's a lot of momentum as well in this space.
01:13And full disclosure, by the way, if the control room wants to come off that VO and show my pretty
01:17face,
01:17I'm an Aura ring wearer and I got a 90 sleep score last night, hence why I look so fresh.
01:2390 out of 100, Ed?
01:25Pretty good.
01:26Not bad.
01:26Okay.
01:27I'm glad you showed us your Aura ring because I've seen them on, I think Tim Stenevich wears one as
01:31well.
01:32Is this a company that relies more on hardware sales or software sales?
01:36Because you can buy the ring first and then you've got to pay a monthly, not premium, but subscription, right?
01:42Yeah.
01:42For the full availability of data, I mean, you know, very much it's a hardware company.
01:47But, you know, the utility of it is its synchronicity with, I use it through iOS, right, on my iPhone.
01:53And the data in aggregate, not just being about sleep health.
01:57I mean, principally, the origin of the hardware in the story was women's health.
02:02But then that is the majority of the wearer base.
02:06But when it comes to the male market, I think that the play that Aura is going for,
02:11and one reason to go public, by the way, do an IPO is, of course, public awareness.
02:15It's a marketing exercise, not just the process of raising funds.
02:19But it's to go after longevity in the male segment.
02:22And that's something that Aura has been talking about a great deal.
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