Oura has bought Finnish metabolic health service Veri – as it looks to bolster its wellness functionality.
Oura has acquired metabolic health company Veri – as it looks to bolster its metabolic health credentials.
Veri – another Finnish brand – enables users to use a CGM to track what they eat and how it affects their blood sugar levels. It’s similar to the likes of Abbott Lingo, Nutrisense, January, Zoe and a wealth of services that offer insights into how the food we eat affects our glucose spikes, which can have knock-on health and wellness effects.
And the announcement makes it clear that Oura plans to add this functionality into its own service:
“Metabolic health is a key area of interest for Oura Members, with 97% of members expressing interest in understanding how the food they eat impacts their health. In a survey of Oura Members, 13% indicated that they have worn a CGM, and 53% are interested in wearing a CGM in the next 12 months,” said CEO Tom Hale.
And that process is already underway. Wareable readers will know that references to food logging have appeared within the Oura app.
Spotters found lines of code for logging food – including the ability to upload photos of meals. That would be a neat workaround for the laborious process of tagging meals. But now it seems this feature is set to be used in collaboration with a CGM, as part of a fuller metabolic health service.
“Today, Oura Ring is a standalone product, but we see a world where the product experience includes other health data inputs and sensors, such as CGMs, factoring into the data and insights presented within the Oura App,” contiunued Hale.
“The expertise of Veri’s team will help accelerate this vision, strengthening our product and opening up new avenues for metabolic health offerings.”
Ironically, Ultrahuman, who has been sued by Oura for infringing its copyrights, already has a partner metabolic health tracking service – via the Ultrahuman M1 CGM.
Any Oura CGM-based service has the potential to be an exciting and meaningful service – if the company can properly bring together metabolic data with lifestyle factors such as sleep and stress tracking.
CGMs + wearables = more interesting data
At Wareable we’ve used a host of metabolic health tracking services – and the data can be really interesting.
But with metabolic health affected by so many outside factors, simply tracking what you eat is useful, but can be one-dimensional.
One food could cause huge spikes one day because you slept badly or are excessively stressed – but another day it might not. That’s not to say that metabolic health trackers aren’t useful – but they’re more intuitive with a 360 degree look at your health.
So Oura could put itself into a great position with the right kind of implementation. And it will already have a good idea of what’s possible, given that Veri was an existing partner via Oura’s Integrations platform.
It will also be interesting to see how quickly Oura moves to add Veri features natively. With app code showing food tracking within the app, it seems close. But we could see a phased roll out – falling short of an Oura branded CGM service being rolled out right away.
Watch this space over the next few weeks and months.
