Saturday, October 10, 2026

Foreword

Alyson Shontell

Editor-in-Chief

This fall was supposed to be the season of big tech IPOs, but one by one, they keep getting pushed or indefinitely delayed.

The latest fakeout came from Oura, the maker of the health-tracking smart ring that seems to be on every executive’s finger.

On Sept. 29, just hours before it was expected to price, Oura postponed its IPO of up to $2.2 billion, citing “uncertainty in the IPO market.” The news came just over two weeks after OpenAI’s Sam Altman told Fortune his company would not go public in 2026, and as Anthropic’s listing continues to get pushed back, with the public release of its IPO prospectus first slipping from September to October, and now to potentially mid-November, according to media reports.

Fortune finance reporter Morgan Chittum set out to find the real reason behind Oura’s delay. The market didn’t look like the culprit: The S&P 500 is up more than 13% this year and near record highs, and a source told Fortune the offering was about five times oversubscribed.

The analysts Morgan spoke with pointed to three other concerns. The first is valuation. At the top of its range, Oura would have been worth $15.6 billion. That’s easier to justify if investors see Oura as an AI-enhanced digital platform, and harder if they see it as a consumer hardware company, which is still where most of its sales come from.

The second is who was cashing out. Nearly three-quarters of the shares on offer were being sold by existing shareholders rather than issued by Oura, so most of the money would have gone to insiders instead of the company.

The third is competition. While Oura currently leads in smart rings, the wider wearables market is dominated by giants like Apple (No. 4) and Google (Alphabet, No. 5). One analyst told Morgan that if Apple ever built a ring, Oura’s business could become largely unnecessary. OpenAI is expected to release wearable AI devices in the near future too.

Oura declined to tell Fortune any new IPO timeline. For Morgan’s full findings, read her story here.

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Deals & Developments

Alphabet (No. 5) subsidiary Google signed a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy (No. 178) to buy nuclear power for its growing data-center operations. The agreement will support upgrades at 11 reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
Broadcom (No. 70), Oracle (No. 82), and SpaceX are reportedly seeking tens of billions of dollars in financing to fund AI hardware purchases, according to the Wall Street Journal. Broadcom is seeking more than $50 billion to finance custom chips it is developing with OpenAI and is reportedly in talks with Apollo Global Management (No. 143) and Blackstone (No. 310), while Oracle reportedly is separately exploring chip financing arrangements with Apollo and Goldman Sachs (No. 36), and SpaceX is in talks for financing of Nvidia (No. 16) chips.
Uber Technologies (No. 92) agreed to acquire ezCater, a Boston-based workplace catering platform, for $2.3 billion in cash. The deal is designed to expand the corporate catering business on Uber Eats.
Medical-device maker Becton Dickinson (No. 211) agreed to invest $19 billion in the U.S. over several years under a deal with the Trump administration that provides conditional relief from future tariffs. The commitment includes $3 billion for manufacturing expansion to increase production of medical supplies in the U.S.