Future of Health Tech with Oura CEO, Brex CEO on Fintech’s Growth, AI for Scientific Discovery | Oct 14, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Tuesday, October 14th. We have got another full tour of the tech sector today for you folks. We are talking about health tech with the CEO of Aura. We are also talking fintech with the CEO of Brex. We're then going to talk about the race to rent out NVIDIA chips. And finally, we have a great discussion planned for you about how AI can actually have an impact on the physical world. But before we get going, I want to highlight for you a big story that we published last night. The information is first to report that OpenAI is working with ARM, the chip company owned in large part by SoftBank, to develop CPUs.

0:54A reminder that CPUs are different from GPUs, the AI chips that have taken the world by storm. But the key thing here is that all AI chips need CPUs to work, and so that is why this story is important. The news came on the heels of OpenAI's announcement that it is working with Broadcom to jointly develop their own chip. And so this is a big story. It is moving arm shares after hours. It moved arm shares after hours last night, I should say. They continue to move this morning. We will link it in the show notes. And with that, let's get to our first guest. Aura has made big news today, announcing it has raised$900 million at an$11 billion valuation.

1:32The investment was led by Fidelity Management and Research Company with participation from Iconic. The company is on track to pass$1 billion in annual sales this year. And I want to bring on Tom Hale, the CEO of the company, to share more about where he plans to take Aura in this next phase of growth. Tom, welcome to TITV. It's great to see you again. Great to see you, Akash. Thanks for having me. So a big day for Aura. The company, the place I want to start with the company is last time you were on the show a couple months ago with Editor-in-Chief Jessica Leston, you mentioned to her that the company is profitable.

2:05And yet you've still raised all this money. And my question is, why do you need to raise the money if you're profitable? Well, good news. Everyone knows that AI is incredibly expensive. And I think AI and the future of healthcare are intertwined. So I think we want to make sure that we have that ability to invest in AI, particularly particularly as we think about acquiring talent and making investments and maybe ultimately developing our own models. So this is certainly the first thing that we want to invest in. The second thing, of course, is that we're still at the very beginning of this business or has been on a tear.

2:35We've been doubling the business year over year. We're about to reach a billion dollars in sales. And the reality is, is we're just getting started because we're barely just in the US today. So we've got a lot of headroom and expansion around the globe. And I think that's going to take us, I think, a fair amount of investment to make sure that we can cover the planet. And the last piece, of course, is healthcare. Our vision always has been to be a wearable that is across the entire surface of holistic health. And healthcare is in transformation right now. We don't have enough doctors. We don't have enough preventative medicine.

3:06The prediction that we do, some of the practices that are grounded in science are still, they're data data. We have up-to-date current data on the people who are wearing the wear ring. We wanna take that data and make it present in health. And I think that's a very different kind of company than what we've been today. And so we need to invest in the talent, in the people, in the process, in the systems, in the science to really a healthcare journey for Aura take its next stride. Whose AI models are you using right now? What are you using them for? We use almost every model that's available. And I think we have a range of things that we do.

3:38It starts, of course, with the predictions that the system makes using algorithms that are basically there to tell you what are the values that we're doing from the signals that we're taking off of your body. And we've been doing that for 10 years. We're probably maybe the best in the world at these kinds of algorithms for signal processing. And so we're talking a combination of open source models, closed source models, I mean, you know, the big models like OpenAI? Well, so for those models, those are almost entirely developed by us, although we're using all the tools. The second place is this kind of idea of what you might think of as the doctor in your pocket, right?

4:10You've already got a supercomputer. You've got a wearable device. There's some intelligence that's looking over that data, knows lots of things about you that you've shared with it, your context, your health history, your tags, your biometrics, and making sense of that. That is actually really another form of this AI, and that's largely models we develop. Then there's interpretation and presentation of insights. So basically, you might want to interrogate your data and say, what's going on? And an LLM-type application will respond to you and say, well, this is what's going on, or you might ask for advice.

4:39And those LLMs are, I think, what you would expect to be the classic LLMs and the open-source and closed-source models that are available. So across all three of those surfaces, you've got a substrate of AI. Now, ultimately, where I think this all goes is you think about the quality of the data that something like the Oura Ring has, meaning it's consistent, it's accurate, it's continuous, it's measured overnight. Right. Feeding a call it a large physiology model with that data is going to be able to create an AI that is effectively targeted and oriented around you because your health and my health are not the same.

5:14And so how do you create an intelligence that supports the vast diversity of both health conditions, people, ethnicities, races around the planet? I think that's the challenge that we want to invest behind. I do want to ask you about the profitability of building out these AI tools, because as you mentioned, the company is profitable now, but we've seen with a lot of these application layer companies, certainly those companies who are looking to build their own models or utilizing models that exist. I mean, it's expensive. There's no two ways about it. And so are you concerned at all that this is going to lower your profitability margin as you look to build out an AI at all?

5:47Or how do you think about that? Well, I have a really interesting kind of thesis on this, and I think part of it goes to privacy. People want to have very strict controls over their health data. And I think that's something that we take as a first principle, and making sure that we don't share your data is like something that Aura believes in from our foundation. Now, the key is, is that how do you do that in a world where you have AI interpreting or even communicating to you via an LLM about your health? Our vision for this is to put that AI at the edge, meaning that it is on the device that's in front of you.

6:22And to the degree that we can put as much of that processing, as much of that AI on a device that's close to you and under your control and is encrypted and maybe locked by your biometrics, that's the vision that we see. Now, the side note effect of that is, is that if you do that, you're also taking advantage of the latent processing power of all these devices, which are underutilized in terms of their computing capability and are accelerating in terms of their power. So part of our vision is to have AI at the edge that is private, but also lower cost. And so that's how we think about that cost problem that you highlight.

6:55And I hear you and it's a tough challenge. It's something that a lot of these wearables companies are thinking about. The other question I wanted to ask is, and you were asked this morning about your plans, whether or not you IPO or not. I mean, how do you think about building this as a standalone company versus something that honestly could fit very nicely into a bigger tech company? And as you talk about edge computing, the ability to put LLMs on the devices themselves, this is something that we've heard companies like Apple is even considering. I think this is the way it's going to go. I think absolutely, and particularly for these kinds of applications, I think actually it's going to be really mandatory to have that privacy at the edge.

7:38So I think that is viable. I think that's the path that we're on. And you think you can do it alone? You can do it alone? So I think, I don't think anybody in tech does anything alone. Akash, let's just be really clear about that. But if you're asking really about us as a standalone company, you know, I mean, we've raised money and we've raised money at a pretty good valuation based on the back of our financials. Our financials support that valuation. This is not an outrageous valuation. This is not some projected value. This is based on the dollars that we delivered last year and the dollars that we're going to deliver next year.

8:09So that's relatively comfortable. However, there's a call option here. And that call option is on that future of AI and healthcare, which I think is being transformed. It's happening faster than maybe anyone predicted. And I think that it seems inevitable. And so there's a call option on that, which I think is actually, honestly, enough to support a company of our size, increasing to, you know, from a$10 billion valuation to a 20, a 30, a 40,$50 billion valuation. Because the future of healthcare and the way health is managed and delivered where people are the agents of their own health journey, they are in charge of their own health journey.

8:41That change is a transformation that I think is a generational transformation. So I don't think of us as like, oh, well, we're a little wearable company. I think of us as like a platform, an operating system for your health. Think about the value that that could create in the market. Two more cool questions for you. I wanted to ask about the devices themselves. You introduced some new designs to today. You know, the price point is still around a couple hundred bucks, right? I see the new designs there. how much money do you make on selling the device itself? So what's amazing is that we make both a contribution margin when we sell our product.

9:20So on day one, we're profitable on a unit economics basis. That's actually really powerful. And the reason why it's powerful is because Aura also has a membership model. And that membership model is sort of an ongoing revenue stream. So when we sell a ring, we're making back the cost of acquisition and the cost of manufacturing and a little bit of profit. And then that is a ticket to a subscription business. Right. How much is that contribution? What do you mean? How much is the contribution margin on the devices? Oh, it's quite high. You know the sort of hardware margins, right? Hardware margins, if they're doing great, are 40%.

9:52We're north. North of 40%. Okay. And by the way, this is a function of being a really good scaled hardware company delivering that. But then that is a zero CAC ticket to a subscription business. And that elevates our margins even higher. So when you look at Aura's financials, we don't look like a hardware company. We look much more like a software company with a hardware component. I think that's a key, again, going back to the valuation of a standalone company. That's one of the keys that allows Aura to be at the top of the cloud of some still valuation. Right. And I should remind people, I mean, you know, this is the second year in a row you're raising money.

10:27I don't know if you, you may have raised money three years in a row. I don't know. But I know you raised another big round last year as well. The last thing I want to ask you before you go is I know you have a number of partnerships with other companies that have devices that are FDA approved. And we've seen companies like Eight Sleep, for example, coming out and declaring, we are going to seek FDA approval for our line of products in the future. Can we expect Aura to seek FDA approval for any of its products in the coming year or two? Yes, we already have a class one medical device in our fertile window.

10:56Basically, that's the feature, the software feature that predicts when a woman is ovulating. So if you're a couple who are trying to conceive, that feature is one that we've worked through the FDA on. And we have others in the pipeline. I think that's part and parcel of kind of our investment towards becoming more and more like a healthcare company. Having FDA approvals is both important for safe and effectiveness, but it's also a mark of seriousness and confidence that the technology is accurate and that it's validated by science and that it can be used by clinicians. It's stunning to me the number of people who use Aura as part of their health regime.

11:3110%, 11 % of our customers are clinicians of one form or another. So we're already in the healthcare space being used in a variety of ways, and we expect to actually extend that further as we work deeper and deeper with the FDA. Great. Tom, well, thank you so much for coming on the show again. It's always a great conversation. Congrats on the new Funding Ground and excited to see the new designs as well that are being released today. That is Tom Hale, the CEO of Aura here on TITB. Okay, earlier this month, the CEO of Brex sent an email out to his employees boldly declaring that the turnaround is over and the company will now return to unconstrained ambition.

12:10I want to bring on Pedro Franceschi, the CEO who wrote that memo, to tell us about how he's shifting his thinking to this new phase of growth for Brex. Pedro, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. So let's talk about the turnaround being over in this period of unconstrained ambition. I kind of want to segment the discussion to two halves. One is the turnaround, one is the unconstrained ambition. Tell us about what exactly the turnaround is that you're referring to. Yeah, so maybe let me just start with where we are today. So if you just look at the business over the past 20 months, we rebuild entirely how we operate as a company.

12:48So when you think about the way we build products, the way we build our go-to-market, the way we operate, the leadership team, and just the sort of talent density on leadership levels in the company, they are very different from where they were 20 months ago. And I wrote a few memos about this on having leaders that operate at all levels, changing the way we build a product, and me as a founder and CEO being much more involved in a product roadmap and the quality of what we ship. And as a result, in August, Brex grew just shy of 50 % year on year and was operating cash flow positive for the first time since his inception.

13:25So it's a very different reality from where it were 20 months ago. And we're very proud of that. And I'm curious that you use the word unconstrained ambition because one of the things that you talked about is the company has been operating cash flow positive for the first time in its history. and my read on it was, okay, we are returning to focusing on growth now and growth at all costs sometimes can yield dicey results, as we've seen with many different companies in Silicon Valley. And so my question for you is, how do you plan to spark this new phase of growth, I guess, while growing profitably?

14:02I mean, that is the constraint that comes with this ambition, right? Absolutely. So when we say unconstrained ambition, really what we mean by that is if we just look at the market that we're in today, and I think folks don't necessarily appreciate that, there's$2 trillion of corporate cards spent in the US. And Brexit today is like, you know, a little bit over 1 % of that. And, you know, if you look at all the new players combined, right, we're maybe 2%, 2.5 % of the market. So this is a market that's very deeply dominated by incumbents. So you have banks that have been around for decades serving customers in a very poor way with no software, with no way of actually improving the way they run their business.

14:40And when we look at the way customers run their operation with Brex and you see, you know, companies like Arm, Cursor, Intel, Anthropic, Palantir, right? All sort of materially changing how their business operates because they partnered with Brex. That is really what we're talking about. How do we bring this spirit and this product that we have working so well for this tiniest liver of the market, this 1 % of the market into this 98 % that's still dominated by income? And that's really what we mean by unconstrained ambition. So how do you do it? How do you do it? Is just continue to execute the same level of rigor, raising the bar every day.

15:16And just really, when you look at the market and you just realize that most people actually have no idea what Brex is or that there's even a better way to think about how you manage your finances as a company. And that's really a very big part of the story. And especially now, if you see what's happening with AI, we think there's this bigger opportunity to not just build the financial services, which is what we did early on, and the software, but effectively all the infrastructure that you build to help these companies replace all the labor that you have traditionally doing work that can now be automated.

15:48And we're very excited about the opportunity. And what do you see as the next phase of fintech, broadly speaking? Because fintech is, it's had a period where we had the Zerp era, we sort of had the reckoning era, and now people are sort of trying to figure out, okay, what does the next few years look like? In your mind, let's make some predictions here. What are we going to see? Yeah, so I have a saying that internally, and I guess externally as well, that fintech in the U.S. hasn't really happened yet. So when you look into the percentage of the market that is using a modern solution like brex it's so tiny still so a lot of the work is just getting customers there it's just literally going after every single business in america using a modern solution and explaining them hey you shouldn't be using american express you shouldn't be using your bank card anymore you shouldn't be using your traditional bill based solution and here the benefits of bringing this all under brex and how it helps your business move faster spend smarter right and all the benefits that we see customers as to deploy a solution like Brex in their team.

16:48So I think that's one, which is, you know, FinTech hasn't really happened when you just look at sort of a very mainstream use case. The second one is when you look into what we built, right? And, you know, we made a few decisions that I think were pretty different in other FinTechs. You know, everything that you have on the financial services side was built in-house. So all the card payment rails, you know, capital markets, underwriting, credit, we built the entire sort of bank stack in-house. Then we build this partner ecosystem that surrounds our customers, especially larger ones. Every single solution they need, they have deep integrations of Rex.

17:21And we did this locally, right? So when you look into sort of the breadth and the depth that you have to have to serve these very sophisticated use cases, that's something that I think will be more of a trend than in FinTech as well. I do want to ask you, Ramp raised a ton of money. You guys must be raising too, right? So, I mean, there's a very good validation in our space that there's huge companies to be built here. And we're very excited about it. Are you raising? Are you out there? We're not raising. Not raising. Okay. Brexit's not raising. So if you're not raising, you know, on the heels of this operating cash flow positivity that you guys have achieved, what is the strategy here to compete with companies like Ramp?

18:04So first, when you look at the size and sheer scale of the market, right, really the competition is American Express, the big banks. That is who we see, you know, 90 % of the deals. That is who we're competing with. And when a lot of what we try to do and sort of educate the market is when you go actually look at the deals that we're in and actually the competition, like who we see is big banks that are treating customers the same way. And that's really who we're trying to win against. that's really the competition for us. And we see a lot of new players in their space, actually almost as a forcing function to help the industry change and realize that there's a better way of doing things.

18:42So for us, that's really the competition. It's just the amount of incumbent banks that treat customers with a solution that is so subpar from where they are, from where they were maybe four or five years ago. And then when you add an AI and just the lack of awareness and understanding of how to build a product that actually fundamentally changes how finance team operates, the bar is exceptionally low. And that's really who we compete with. Right. Great. Well, Pedro, I want to thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. I am excited to see what new products you have in store for us, because one of the things you talked about in your memo was that you've got a lot of stuff under the hood, which means I'm excited to see it rolling out.

19:18That is Pedro Franceschi, the CEO of Brex. Thank you so much for joining us here on TI-TV. Well, OpenAI is charging ahead with its plans to make its own chips. Largely, though, it relies on the business of renting AI chips, and that business has given rise to a new segment of companies called NeoClouds. My colleague Stephanie Palazzolo published a story on that topic here. I realize that that intro doesn't quite make sense. We're talking about NeoClouds here on the show. My colleague Stephanie published a great story on the topic, and she has some reporting on Together AI, which I want to get to.

19:50Stephanie, welcome back to the show. It is great to have you. Let's talk all about the wonderful business of NeoCloud. What is the news with Together AI that you found? Let's start there. Yeah, definitely. So Together AI is a company that's actually up until this point kind of been known as either an inference provider, or some people call them a GPU reseller. And basically what that means is Together goes out and rents compute from other cloud providers and then resells that compute to AI developers. They also have another segment of their business where they host open source models like LAMA and get them to run super fast and for super cheap, and then basically allow developers access those open source models through an API.

20:38That's been in the business so far, but now it's essentially looking to, instead of renting out compute from other companies and reselling it, it wants to actually buy its own NVIDIA GPUs put them in its own data centers, and then operate those data centers. So essentially, it wants to become a cloud provider of its own. NeoCloud is kind of just another word for cloud provider that is specifically talking about, you know, companies, I guess, smaller cloud providers like CoreWeave, Crusoe, Lambda, that, you know, Together is now kind of joining that are looking to, you know, compete against the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

21:22So let me just clarify a couple of points here. So we've got this group of NeoClouds, right? These are companies that they are the newer cloud companies, I guess, and their business traditionally has been renting compute essentially and then selling them out to other customers. What we're seeing here, correct me, I'm asking here. What we're seeing here is together, one of these NeoCloud companies saying, hey, I'm kind of tired of being a NeoCloud. I just want to be a regular cloud company. And so they're going out, they're buying these chips, sort of similar to the way AWS or Microsoft Azure has, and they're going to sell that compute then to its customers.

22:04Do I have that right? Yeah, so NeoClouds and cloud providers are essentially the same thing. So it's more that Together wants to become a cloud provider now by its own chips. But NeoCloud is just like a subsection of the cloud provider group that's specifically referring to these newer kind of upstart clouds like CoreWeave that are trying to compete against the bigger cloud providers. So effectively, we can kind of just call them cloud providers, really. Yeah, basically, a big part of my job is just giving new names to things that help add old names and making it even easier. So we can basically call them plotifiers, yeah.

22:43Okay, well, we should say you do a lot more than that, Stephanie. Okay, so don't sell yourself short. I do want to talk about, so you talked about the biggest players here in the Neo Cloud space. We've got the Core Weaves, we've got the Together AI. You know, a big part of this, though, is the margins associated with renting out this compute. That's a big reason that you talked about the story that Together is looking to buy these GPUs. You know, is there evidence that this actually will help their margins? Because the chips are still quite expensive, really. Yeah, definitely. So the kind of thinking here is if you're renting out compute from another cloud provider, you are obviously losing some margin to them.

23:28So if you were to buy those chips by yourself, you're kind of taking out that middleman cloud provider, which should help margins theoretically. And it does seem like it has in the case of Together. I've heard from sources that the margins have been going up, even in the relatively short amount of time so far that it's been buying its own chips and now set at around 45%. That's still a lot lower than your traditional kind of software, 70 % plus gross margins. Right. It is better than kind of what Together was experiencing in the past from having to rent out chips from a cloud provider first. And help me understand, why would a customer seek to get compute essentially or cloud services from Together as opposed to one of the big hyperscaler cloud companies?

24:18And what is the value proposition that these NeoCloud or smaller cloud providers actually have? Yeah, so there's a couple of reasons why a developer might want to do that. So I think first, with a lot of the bigger cloud providers, sometimes you have to commit to, you know, multi-year contracts, three or five years. And a lot of the times, if you're just a small startup, you really have no idea what your compute needs are going to look like three to five years from now. Or, you know, sometimes if you're even going to be around as a company. And so, you know, NeoClouds let customers commit to kind of smaller or shorter contracts and are better at kind of meeting demand whenever it spikes.