Ōura's Health Vision, Tesla's Optimus Robots, and Sports Tech Investments | July 25, 2025

0:13Good morning, everyone, and welcome to TI-TV. It is Friday, July 25th, and you get me today. I'm filling in for Akash Pashrika. I'm Jessica Lesson, the founder of The Information, and I'm so happy to be here today for what is a wonderful lineup. We have Tom Hale, who is the CEO of Aura. You all know the Aura rings. You see them all throughout Silicon Valley. Lots to discuss with him about the future of health tracking, AI, and more. And then I'm excited to sit down with two of my colleagues from the information. Thea Waite, our Elon Musk reporter, has a big story out about Optimus. Yes, the Tesla robot.

0:56He's going to bring us inside that story. And Sarah Germano, our weekend reporter on sports, also is going to preview a piece she has coming out this weekend. Of course, you know, it's been a wild week. More AI news across the board. And I want to highlight two breaking news pieces from the information. Yesterday in Dealmaker, Natasha Mascarenas reported that Elad Gill is raising a$1 billion fund. Now, we all know Elad, a prolific tech investor. I think he's in perplexity stripes, so many others. But this is really an eye-popping number for a solo GP. And so please check out that story if you're following the space of venture capital.

1:46And then this morning in AI Agenda, Stephanie Palazzolo gives a sneak peek of GPT-5. Yes, we are waiting for OpenAI to deliver the next version of its model. It is highly, highly anticipated. and staff sat down with some folks or person who has been using it and reported that there is meaningful progress in many areas, but including coding. So get ready. We are already in the AI coding wars, but I think if we look in just the coming weeks, there probably is more to come from OpenAI. So make sure to check out that story. All right. Well, I'm especially excited to kick things off with Tom. It seems everywhere we go, we are in the health tracking, the sleep tracking, the glucose, the blood tracking.

2:39Of course, the digital quantified self is nothing new in Silicon Valley, but it's definitely, I think, entering a new age. And Tom is here to tell us all about it. So Tom, welcome to TITV. Thank you, Jessica. It's a super pleasure to be here this morning. It's a cold, cold morning in San Francisco, but very brisk. Makes me feel good. Listen, I think you got it. I think the reality is that the movement started with quantified self, right? People trying to optimize. Then it sort of spread to longevity. Everybody wants to live forever. So you want to make sure you're making all the right choices and doing all the right things and supplements and full plunges to kind of live forever.

3:23But the reality is it's now really spread, I think, all the way just to sort of basic health. For those of you who don't know, the Aura Ring is a very, very small, comfortable, attractive, wearable. It sits on your finger, eight-day battery life. We have been on a tear, Jessica. You're right. Tell us about the numbers, Tom. What can you share about this tear? So we last year crossed$500 million in revenue, annual revenue. Wow. And how do you make money from the hardware and the software? Yeah, we uniquely make money from the sales of the hardware. And we have different finishes. So if you like gold or silver, you have a choice about what kind of finish you want.

4:02But we also have a subscription. And the subscription is basically your data, the updates to the software, the analytics and the AI, all the things that support the experience of you understanding what's going on with your body. We call it giving your body a voice. So the business was$500 million last year. That was about 120 % year-over-year growth. So, power of a tear. And the good news is that this year, that growth pace has not just stayed the same. It's actually accelerated. So, we're a very well-scaled business. We're profitable. Last year, we raised money from Fidelity and Dexcom at a$5 billion valuation.

4:38You know, this, I think, smart ring category is really on fire and Aura's leader in it. So, Todd, let's talk about the category, too, because you've got the smart ring. You've got the loop bands. You've got, you know, trackers like eight sleep for your sleep. How do you differentiate with so many new players on the market? Yeah, I think the most important thing actually is the accuracy of the form factor. Basically, if you think about this site on the human body is actually an incredible place to measure your physiology. Why is that? Well, it's on the leading edge of your pulse waveform. Your heart pumps, blood goes shooting down your arm.

5:13This is kind of the first stop on the way. Contrast that to the wrist where the blood's on the way back to the heart. It's capillary action. You have bones, sinew, hair, discoloration, tattoos, all the things that make sensing there a little bit more difficult. The signal strength for us is about 50 to 100 times stronger than the wrist. How about this, guys? When you go to the hospital, where do they put the sensor? They put the sensor on the tip of your finger. They don't put it on the back of your wrist. And that's because the strength of the signal is so good there. And what that means for most people is that we can actually see things and make insights that are surprising.

5:45For example, one of the classic kind of aura experiences is, you know, you're sort of you get this alert from the app and it says, hey, it looks like you might have some signs of symptoms coming on. We call it symptom radar. And you say, oh, I feel fine. I'm doing great. And then three days later, you're lying on the couch surrounded by Kleenex. You've got the flu or a cold, something like that. And like, geez, I really wish I'd listen to my aura ring. Taking some zinc, we would be in a totally different situation. And I obviously forgot the Apple Watch when I was listing all the players. So more accuracy on the finger.

6:17I have to remember my biology, but you gave me a good walk through it. Walk us through. I think, you know, the category also sort of started in sleep and has broadened. So walk us through the things that you're able to track for your customers and also what you think you might be able to track in the future. Yeah. So sleep is such a powerful thing, honestly, because sleep is like this sort of universal good. If you have a good night's sleep, you're going to feel better the next day. But also, if you do it over the long term, it's much better for your health. Three or four years ago, I think people might have characterized us as the best sleep tracker in the world, the most accurate, the most comfortable, the longest battery life, all those things.

6:57But since then, we've expanded into a sort of a range of health verticals. The first big step was into activity, readiness, stress, a measure of resilience, which is about how you recover and respond to daytime stress. But the key, and this is the key to our outrageous growth, is women. One of the things that we were able to do is start to really see the trajectory of a woman during her cycle. And that gave us a lot of power. It gave us the ability to predict when your period might come. It gave us the power to tell you when you might ovulate, when you should, you know, if you're trying to conceive, when you should have intercourse in order to have the best probability of having a child.

7:37And the thing is, is that this audience uniquely, I think, has an appeal for a ring. You know, this is a much better, much cuter accessory than an iPhone that's strapped to your wrist. I think that that really hit the market perfectly. We hit an underserved market. Now, since women's health, we've kind of continued to expand into pregnancy. we're expanding into parented pause and menopause. This kind of understanding that a woman's physiology changes every 30 days, give or take, and then changes over her life really dramatically. It's a great fit for the O-ring. Now, beyond that, we started going into heart health and healthy aging.

8:10So understand. You mentioned longevity. It is the rage right now. Turns out people want to live forever. Isn't that strange? Do they know that that can be another topic? We're happy to optimize in the game of living as long as possible. I think you want to live healthy. I think our view on that is that living forever sounds pretty terrible. But what you really want to do is have the healthiest, best life for the longest. In fact, our most recent ad campaign is filled with sort of seniors living their best life and raising their finger and saying, you know, give us the finger. It's a love book.

8:41So, but the reality is that heart health is really one of the foundations of aging. And the other one, of course, is metabolic. And so right now I'm wearing a blood glucose sensor from Dexcom. That data makes its way into your aura application. It's correlated with all sorts of things. You can take a photo of your meal and we use AI to interpret the values of your meal and give you a little bit of coaching and steering along the way. And so what we really think about is sleep is this foundation. and if you sleep well, lots of other things in your health are going to go better. And then there are these verticals of your health, each one of which working together is how you build a good plan and good behaviors for a long and healthy life.

9:21And that requires, I mean, I think with your approach, that probably requires a lot of partnerships too across these other, you know, health tracking devices. I mean, how do you pull all of that together? And I know in some ways, if we go back to the iPhone on the wrist, as you said, the Apple Watch, you know, I think you also see sort of some people trying to cram as much as possible into one device. Where is the ecosystem on the partnership side and how do you strategize around the next steps there? So we have over 800 partners. And today, though, they range from people who are using our data for a purpose.

9:59For example, the digital contraceptive natural cycles uses our temperature data to make an assessment of whether or not it's a safe day to have intercourse and not get pregnant. That would be one use case. But the other use case is actually where we ingest data from that wearable or that device or that source. It can be anywhere. You know, smart scale could be a CGM sensor. The thing that I think I would emphasize is that while we make a beautiful and very high quality piece of hardware, we are actually a software platform company. And if you think about the 13 billion hours of data that we collect, that data is actually the source of insights about people's health.

10:40And the thing about that data, of course, is it's highly accurate. We've been in 80 plus peer reviewed publications that are saying this is the most accurate device. and it's continuous. And the continuous stuff is key. The reason why it's important is because if you measure data during the day, that's great. It's wonderful. It's great to know how many steps you took, all that stuff. But the problem is there's all sorts of confounding factors. So extracting meaning from that data can be challenging. Nighttime wear, by contrast, is actually a very predictable kind of series of states that a normal body goes through.

11:14And more importantly, not just a normal body, but your normal body. And so understanding you and understanding your baseline through nighttime tracking means that we can see incremental changes that can be indicative of some things going on, which is why we can predict illness very effectively. Like we can warn you of symptoms coming on because we see the early signals of it in this nighttime data where the signal to noise ratio is so good that we can actually extract meaning from it. So that is such a key, I think, to thinking about Aura. It's a software platform that's going to incorporate data from all sorts of devices and partners.

11:47And ultimately, our vision, of course, is that what we want to imagine is a new version of health. You know, today, health is episodic. You go once a year, they get a checkup, the doctor takes your temperature, your blood pressure, measures your height, says things are going great. How are you sleeping? The idea of a doctor in your pocket, I think, is really impressive because you might have already a smartphone, and that smartphone is a supercomputer. And by the way, it's also about to be an AI platform. You have a wear that's on your body 24-7, and then there's a machine intelligence that's overlooking you.

12:17And if you think about the problems of healthcare systems today, and by the way, we should all acknowledge that health is sort of utterly fundamentally broken. The incentives are wrong. The service is wrong. We spend way too much money for terrible outcomes. Our vision is to really see that transform. And if you can imagine a world where, one, you have access to care that you didn't have before because some portion of it is either augmented or delivered by machine, right? This sort of AI doctor in your pocket, I think, is a vision that is coming. And looking at Trump's announcements this week, it's only going to accelerate, I think.

12:50If you look at that, you couple that idea with this notion that you can actually look across someone's data and build a model for them, who they are, and be able to make predictions about what's going to happen in their life and their health. I think that's supremely valuable. And so our vision is that if we can move health care away from interventionist care at the end of life, which is where most of the cost is, to preventative care earlier in life and being kind of a companion with you throughout your life, think of the woman who goes from, you know, menstruation to contraception to conception to pregnancy to post, you know, postpartum to perimenopause to menopause and then to healthy age.

13:29I have no idea who you're talking about, Tom. No idea who you're talking about. I have three kids, you know, and I'm 42. But yes, I'm familiar. You are absolutely in the sweet spot, by the way. You are absolutely in the sweet spot. I'm just going to have to remember you said that. Yes. But well, let's and before I let you go, let's talk a bit about AI, because I also have to say the doctor in your pocket technology. I mean, I've been covering Silicon Valley 20 years and I've been talking to startups with this ambition for 20 years. Now, obviously, technology is advanced. We were talking about very different devices back then, but we also have AI.

14:03So what are you doing today with AI and maybe 12 months from now? How do you think AI will fit into your platform? I mean, obviously, you know, every topic, I think our time to AI in this call was like five and a half minutes, which is pretty good. You should write to it. But the thing that's really happening here, and it's happening faster than I think maybe I would have believed, you know, it could, is that there is the ability to have an interaction that provides insight. Most wearables, most devices provide data. Maybe there's a regulatory kind of constraint that says this is, you know, you can't change the device once it's been released because it needs to be safe and effective and the FDA needs.

14:44The thing about AI is it's incredibly fluid and incredibly malleable and you can move it very quickly. So for us today, we have an AI in the product, which you can chat with and it knows everything about you and it has your context. It can give you insights and draw graphs. It's a way of both inspecting your data, but also gaining insight. It sort of tells you things. Somebody I was talking to recently who's a customer, I said, so what do you like about the Aura Advisor, which is what it's called? He said, oh, I love that it tells me to take walks with my dog. And he remembers my dog's name. Wow.

15:16I find that incredible. And the thing is, if you think about someone who's going to change your behavior, if that someone knows you and knows things about you and has a sense of like whether today's a good day for you to take some exercise or not. That is so powerful. And I think AI is uniquely suited to that. Now, the second thing that's happening, of course, is that the ability to have data that is continuous and high quality that feeds that AI, I think is also a game changer. Because the thing about the ORA ring is that people wear it 24-7. And so you have this kind of continuous signal. So that ability to sort of match a continuous signal with intelligence, I think, is really key.

15:53Where we think this all ends up, of course, is that there will be clinicians who will be more effective and more efficient because an AI assistant has, you know, taken the work out of it and done some preliminary assessment and maybe provided the clinically relevant data to the clinician. But we also know that actually people want to self-manage their care. One of the things that I find most interesting and shocking about Aura is it turns out roughly one in four of Aura members, we have millions of members, by the way, this is not a small number, millions of members. One in four is using aura to manage their chronic illness.

16:26And that ranges from heart disease to, you know, type 2 diabetes, all the way down to this long tail of kind of diseases like lupus or inflammation or ME-CFS or postural orthopedic tachycardia syndrome, which is when you stand up your heart, you know, races and your blood pressure drops. Like they want to know what's going on in their body minute to minute in a very kind of like way that helps them manage their chronic illness. Well, it turns out six out of 10 people in the United States have a chronic illness. So we're already in the healthcare business using AI to guide them. And the thing is, is I think chat is one modality and we'll see that evolve.

17:03I think the way apps are being, you know, kind of presented and information being presented is going to change. You're going to have parts of apps that are really the AI talking to you directly through the app, right? Rather than you prompting and asking a question, it's making data, creating a prompt and talking to you. And I think that's a game changer. That's where the doctor in your pocket vision, I think it's compelling. I think it's becoming reality now much sooner, much faster than we thought. Yeah. Well, Tom, congrats on the big revenue run. It sounds like you guys are really at the heart of this movement.

17:37And it will be very exciting to check back in and see how all these pieces are coming together. So thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate it, Jessica. Have a great day. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye. Wow. Well, I did realize that really women have been so key to this Aura Run that Tom shared those numbers with us about. So very excited to see where that goes. And I know we'd love to hear from our viewers about more digital health tracking related questions. We could do many shows on that. So speaking of a topic that keeps on giving, this week, my colleague Theo Waite had a wonderful or wonderful, a very interesting story about what is happening with Tesla's Optimus robot.

18:26So obviously this week, and I look forward to talking to Theo about Tesla earnings that also came out, which weren't so rosy. It seems like when they're not so rosy on the car front, Elon starts talking a lot more about the robo front. So let's bring on Theo and have him peel back the curtain on this story. Great to see you, Theo. How's it going? Good. Thanks for being on. So tell our viewers the crux of what you reported this week in terms of the progress that manufacturing the Optimus is really making. So basically, we understand that Elon Musk outlined this goal earlier this year to make 5000 Optimus robots this year.

19:11And it seems like they're not on track to hit it based on my reporting. It is possible they could drastically ramp things up in the remainder of the year, but it doesn't seem like they're on track at the moment. And they're in the hundreds? Is that where you pace them at the moment? That's right. That's right. They're in the hundreds, not the thousands. And a big reason why is that hands are incredibly complicated. And in the robotics industry, there's this debate about whether robots actually need hands. And Elon falls very much on the they do need hands side, but they're incredibly, incredibly hard to pull off.

19:46And that's a major bottleneck for them at the moment. But has Elon said why? I mean, it seems to me like he's got such this vision of the humanoid, right? I mean, he has outlined, you know, throngs of optimists. What's the plural of optimist? Optimize? Thongs of optimize descending on Mars. I guess there's sort of just from a visual sense, they need hands. But is it also just in terms of the breadth of tasks that he envisions them doing? I think it's both. Yeah. You know, there are definitely people inside Tesla that are thinking about how to deploy Optimus robots in factories that acknowledge, you know, there are a lot of things you could just do with pinchers or with even like a non-human form at all.

20:30But Elon's vision is very much, you're going to have this robot in your house. It's going to cook for you. It's going to clean. You're going to go to a restaurant. It will be serving you. And to have one model that can accomplish all of those tasks, you kind of do need hands. And it looks cooler. Yeah. Well, we'll talk a bit, too, about where you think the optimist, like its significance for Tesla in this moment. I think it's getting a lot more play because EV sales are going down. You know, as you pointed out in the intro, you know, the more that EV sales fall, Tesla revenue this week was down 12 percent.

21:09The more Elon wants to sell people on his very long term vision for the company. But it's, you know, I think a lot of analysts are probably pretty skeptical. He was asked on earnings, you know, how will optimists contribute to revenue in the next two to three years? And he basically didn't answer the question. He said he was only comfortable talking five years down the line. And so, you know, that's not great if you're reporting quarter over quarter declines consistently. That's also interesting because Elon Musk does not shy from predictions. But maybe he shies from revenue predictions on earnings calls.

21:46Maybe that's a little more. But that kind of leads me to my next question, which like, you know, is it a big deal if Optimus, you know, misses this deadline in an extraordinary way? I mean, I think Elon is known for really throwing very, very, very ambitious timelines out there. Obviously, he is innovating in places that others are not. But do you think in this moment with the scrutiny or just the moment, does this sort of matter or are people just discounting his timeline anyway and a little progress may go a long way in their estimation? I think the idea that Elon makes demands and makes promises that aren't always met, you know, that's not novel.

22:33Anyone that's followed him, you know, understands that. But the stakes are a lot higher now just because, again, because of the pressure on the EB business. You know, I think that if Apple Vision Pro is a flop, who cares? iPhone sales are still at least, you know, stable if not going up, you know, and that for a company like Apple, it's not a big deal to have this like longer term bet that might not be going so well. For Tesla, if the core business is, you know, not doing very well at all, then it does raise the stakes for what he says is going to be the future of the company. I mean, he's made the claim that Tesla will be worth$25 trillion someday because of Optimus.

23:09And that's like, you know, half the current value of the S &P. It's great. You've also got some great details in the story just about the team behind Optimist. Tell us what you've learned and how they're sort of being handled internally. It's interesting. Elon is very willing to make kind of public pronouncements about the future of Optimist and, you know, post videos and pictures of the robots. But within Tesla, there's a lot of secrecy here on the program. people who are in the Tesla R &D facility in Palo Alto that are working on Optimus. They can't get into the Optimus section in the factory where they're making the robots in Fremont, California.

23:50There's kind of an extra level of security to get to from the car areas to the robot areas. And internally on the org chart, we understand that no one can see employees working on Optimus So if you're trying to understand the breadth of the program or, you know, maybe you're going to go make a robotic startup and you want to poach some people, it's much harder to find than other people in other parts of the company. That's interesting. So even the internal org chart, people can't find them. You know, it reminds me, many years ago I was interviewing Elon and what struck me was how paranoid he was about spying and especially Chinese spying back then, too.

24:30So obviously that's true across all of the products. But I wonder if, you know, if there's an element of that at play, which, you know, one might understand. Well, Theo, what else? What's next for you when you think of Elon, Tesla? I mean, the most what's so fun about the coverage is all the companies are tying together, right? I mean, we've got XAI, which is on the cusp of, you know, another crazy funding, another huge colossus. But just sort of tell us a little bit about what questions are next in your mind as it relates to covering Elon and his empire. Yeah, I think the overlap between Tesla and XAI is going to be really interesting.

25:19Elon has said they're going to put Grok chatbot into Optimus. and they're going to put Grok into Tesla's. And, you know, obviously there's some overlap between AI training for, you know, Tesla's products that, you know, would probably benefit from some of what XAI is doing. And there's also this question that, you know, Elon himself hasn't really been in support of, but this idea that, you know, maybe someday there could be an XAI Tesla merger or, you know, more kind of financial intertwining of these two companies. And, you know, I think that question is always going to be there as long as he's CEO of all of them.