• Markets: Like a drunk Roomba, stocks wavered yesterday, beginning the day up before eventually settling just a hair below where they started as investors parsed more AI jitters and rising bond yields. You know who didn’t mind? CarMax, which spiked after it showed evidence that its turnaround plan is working.

HOLD YOUR HORSES

Niv Bavarsky

Just a day before Oura was set to go public, the smart ring maker said it was going to hold off. Oura was eyeing a whopping $14.1 billion valuation, well above the $11 billion valuation it snagged after its funding round last year.

And, up until a few weeks ago, it might have achieved that valuation. The company generated $1.4 billion in revenue and $59 million in net income from June 2025 to June 2026, according to a regulatory filing, positioning it to hit the Nasdaq running. The IPO market was also red hot, with companies raising $127 billion so far in 2026—a 400% jump from last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

So what happened?

The Iran war, to start. As oil prices jumped, the Federal Reserve signaled more interest rate hikes. That, combined with just about every AI evangelist warning of the impending apocalypse, has made investors nervous. In the last few days, Holtec Nuclear and Bamboo Insurance put their IPOs on pause, claiming bad timing.

Oura said that, despite strong demand for its stock, it would hit pause on going public “due to uncertainty in the IPO market.”

Meanwhile, Anthropic is full steam ahead

Anthropic is moving forward with its IPO, confident it can hit the $2 trillion valuation it reportedly expects next month. But there are other concerns, according to the company’s prospectus that Reuters got a hold of this week:

• Anthropic said that AI could produce “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” The company used 80 of the 261 pages in the document to explain potential risks, and just 48 on business.
• The AI giant also reported a net loss of $42 billion last year, while revenue grew to $4.6 billion, meaning profits have not caught up to the buzz. Anthropic also plans to supercharge spending, projecting $518 billion over the next few years.

Bottom line: An IPO this big will have ripple effects, as the world watches for any missteps in the “circular economy” that AI companies have constructed. Oura also has a lot riding on AI: It relies on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google for models, in addition to third-party data centers.—MM

      

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