TheChek News Flow

Finnish health tech company Oura has raised $900 million in fresh funding led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, with participation from new investor ICONIQ and contributions from Whale Rock and Atreides.

The company said today that this funding will value it at “approximately $11 billion,” more than double the valuation it received for its last round in December. Bloomberg previously reported that Oura was closing new funding at $11 billion valuation.

“This new funding is a testament to the strength of Oura business and the trust millions of members place in us every day. We’re proud to be building not just a product, but a global movement toward proactive health—helping people understand their bodies, make better lifestyle decisions, and connect more effectively with their healthcare providers,” CEO Tom Hale said in a statement.

The company told TechCrunch that it plans to use the new funding for AI and production innovation, introducing new health features, and improving its global distribution.

Oura has sold over 5.5 million smart rings since launch. The past year has been particularly fruitful for the company, providing more than half of those sales. The smart ring maker more than doubled its revenue in 2024, raking in $500 million. The company expects the trend to continue this year, with sales likely to cross $1 billion. According to a report from IDC published last year, Oura holds more than 80% of the smart ring market.

The company is also luring customers of different demographics. Earlier this week, at the Elevate conference in Toronto, Oura’s chief commercial officer, Dorothy Kilroy, said that women in their early twenties are becoming a core market for the company.

Oura launched its latest device, Oura ring 4, last October. Earlier this month, the company launched ceramic versions of the ring along with a new optional charging dock.

Beyond health-tracking hardware, the company is venturing into health tests. This month, Oura launched a new feature called Health Panels in the app that lets users book a blood test for $99 at one of 2,000 Quest Diagnostics’ labs across the U.S. While Oura doesn’t provide medical advice, users will be able to see the report in the app and chat with its AI bot about general suggestions.

The new blood testing feature also pits Oura against startups like Whoop, which launched a similar feature this month, as well as ring makers like Ultrahuman and Samsung.

Chobani has raised $650 million at a $20 billion valuation, according to two people familiar with the deal but not authorized to talk about it, Niko Gallogly is first to report.

That investment will help the yogurt maker fund two major projects announced last year: a $500 million plant expansion in Idaho, which is expected to increase the factory’s production by nearly 50 percent, and a $1.2 billion food-processing plant in Rome, N.Y.

The 20-year-old company expects to make $3.8 billion in net sales this year, a 28 percent increase from last year. It also expects to rake in $780 million in adjusted pretax earnings, a 53 percent jump from 2024.

Chobani has benefited from America’s protein craze. Last year, the company introduced a line of high-protein yogurts and shakes.

Its ambitions are much bigger than yogurt. The company sells oat milk, creamers and — after a $900 million acquisition of La Colombe — coffee. Those products generated around $600 million in retail sales during the 12 months through September, according to company data reviewed by DealBook. This past spring, Chobani announced the acquisition of Daily Harvest, a maker of plant-based foods.

In 2021, the company filed for an initial public offering, reported at a multibillion-dollar valuation, but withdrew it because of challenging market conditions.

“This investment means more than just capital — it’s a testament to everything we’ve built,” Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani’s founder and C.E.O., told DealBook in an email.

Controversial project to ship heavy crude to Texas coast was killed by Biden administration on environmental grounds

The US and Canada are considering reviving a controversial oil pipeline as part of a grand bargain to ease some of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium.

Dominic LeBlanc, who is responsible for Canada-US trade, has been in Washington this week for talks with senior US officials, following a meeting between Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney in the White House last week.

Officials from both sides said that the prospect of restarting work on the Keystone XL oil pipeline — scrapped by former US president Joe Biden on environmental grounds — was on the table and had been discussed in recent meetings.

Ottawa was “open to exploring Keystone” if the US wanted to, Canada’s energy minister Tim Hodgson told the Financial Times.

He said Canada, the US’s biggest foreign supplier of oil by far, would link energy supply with progress on Trump’s tariffs.

“We are open to discussing the advancement of continental energy security, if we also address the irritants for steel and aluminium,” Hodgson said.

One person familiar with the discussions during Carney’s visit last week said US officials pushed Canada to provide more energy in exchange for tariff relief. Keystone XL was raised in that context, the person said.

A US official said reviving the project was “something the president would like”, but cautioned it was “not a silver bullet” to resolve the trade dispute between the two countries. The official said the US remained concerned about other trade barriers.

Keystone XL, first proposed more than 15 years ago, was an extension to an existing system and would have shipped 830,000 barrels a day of heavy crude from the western province of Alberta to refineries on the US Gulf coast.

But it became a lightning rod for the environmental movement, which said that the infrastructure would underpin the expansion of carbon-intensive projects in Alberta’s north.

Barack Obama shuttered the project in 2015 as it “would not serve the national interests of the US”. It was relaunched in 2017 by Trump during his first presidency but scrapped again by Biden in June 2021.

TC Energy, the Canadian developer, terminated the project shortly after Biden’s cancellation, prompting jubilation from oil sand opponents. Republicans have continued to call for its revival in recent years.

In February Alberta premier Danielle Smith posted on X “agreed” in response to Trump’s Truth Social post “We want the Keystone Pipeline XL built!” 

Keystone XL had become Canada’s “zombie pipeline”, said Rory Johnston, an oil analyst at Commodity Context.

“It has become some weird symbol in the place of actual progress in Canada’s oil industry,” he said. “Never built but never fully dead, always there when someone needs it.”

Any tariff relief for Canada would break an impasse that has left the US’s second-biggest trading partner among a handful of countries not to have struck a substantial deal with Trump.

Although Canada was offered a large carve-out from sweeping tariffs Trump unveiled in April, he imposed 50 per cent levies on its steel and aluminium, as well as new duties on cars and lumber. 

Canada has already fully permitted its portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, but years of extensive lobbying in Washington had failed to revive the project in the US.

Hodgson said increasing US access to Canadian oil sands could benefit “continental energy security”, given that many American refineries were set up to process the heavy crude.

“Just like we’re talking about continental energy security, I think we need to talk about continental security with respect to steel and aluminium. If we’re dealing with all those things, Canada’s open to having that discussion,” he said.

Canada supplied more than 4mn b/d of crude to its southern neighbour last year, about 60 per cent of the US’s total crude imports.

Heather Exner-Pirot, head of energy at Ottawa’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute think-tank, said declining supplies of heavy oil from Mexico and Venezuela, coupled with slowing output growth from US shale fields, boosted Canada’s case.

It should come as “no surprise that the USA was going to come looking for safe, cheap and reliable supply from the Canadian oil sands”, she said.

South Bow, a TC Energy spin-off that operates the Keystone pipeline system, said it was not privy to the talks between the Canadian and US governments.

“South Bow will continue to explore opportunities that leverage our existing corridor with our customers and others in the industry,” said a spokesperson.

Endorsement comes after Berlin signals readiness to allow more centralised markets supervision

Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called for the establishment of a single European stock exchange, signalling German support for plans to unify the bloc’s capital markets.

“We need a kind of European stock exchange so that successful companies such as biotech firms from Germany do not have to go to the New York Stock Exchange,” said Merz in a speech to the Bundestag on Thursday. “Our companies need a sufficiently broad and deep capital market so that they can finance themselves better and, above all, faster.”

Merz’s comments come as his government recently agreed to intensify collaboration with France to advance the EU’s capital markets union (CMU), including by handing over powers to a single European supervisor — abandoning Berlin’s previous reluctance to shifting regulatory powers to EU bodies.

EU plans for capital markets integration have stalled in large part due to Germany’s opposition to shifting supervision from the Bonn-based BaFin to the European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma), which is headquartered in Paris. Other countries including Luxembourg and Cyprus are also against centralised supervision.

The CMU — and a single watchdog mirroring the US Securities Exchange Commission — were among the priorities listed by former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi in his report about how Europe can regain its competitive edge against global rivals including China and the US.

Germany’s finance minister Lars Klingbeil has recently agreed to explore areas where centralised supervision is warranted as part of Franco-German preparatory work on the CMU, three people with knowledge of the matter previously told the Financial Times.

Merz, who advised US asset manager BlackRock and sat on the board of Deutsche Börse before returning to politics in 2018, is backing the push on CMU as part of his efforts to revive the German economy after three years of stagnation.

In his speech ahead of an EU summit next week, Merz outlined a plan for greater EU integration, less regulation and the implementation of recommendations made by Draghi and another former Italian PM, Enrico Letta, on how to eliminate remaining barriers on the bloc’s single market of goods, capital, labour and services.

“Mario Draghi’s report shows that much of the growth gap between the EU and the US is due to insufficient productivity growth in Europe,” Merz said. “Productivity is the most important prerequisite for competitiveness . . . Europe will only become more productive if it changes profoundly.”

Among EU members pushing for greater capital markets integration, France has argued that unified EU oversight of systemic financial infrastructure, such as stock exchanges and central counterparties, will set consistent standards across the bloc, reduce market fragmentation and cut compliance costs for cross-border operators.

The European Commission is working on proposals due this year on empowering Esma with additional supervisory powers of selected entities such as central counterparties, central securities depositories, trading venues, as well as cryptocurrency exchanges. Berlin, however, is for now opposed to Esma oversight on crypto.

Highest-paying firms increase payouts as the sector’s fortunes reverse, Goldman Sachs report shows

Top traders at some of the biggest hedge funds are taking home almost a quarter of the profits they make for investors, according to a Goldman Sachs report, as the likes of Citadel and Millennium extend their hold over the industry.

A war for talent between multi-manager hedge funds has pushed up pay in the industry, with firms luring traders with packages that can be worth more than $100mn.

Goldman said that managers at the highest paying firms had this year secured payouts worth 24.5 per cent of the profits they made for investors, compared with 22 per cent in 2022.

Hedge funds have evolved from a structure where star traders from banks, trading firms and asset managers would strike out on their own to one increasingly dominated by goliaths that house hundreds of portfolio managers and their teams of analysts trading a full spectrum of assets.

Multi-managers have captured more than $425bn in assets, Goldman said, up more than a third since the investment bank’s first report on the platforms in 2022.

After net outflows from the sector in 2024 and weak performance from some firms in 2023, multi-managers are once again hoovering up investor capital and notching stronger returns.

The total managed assets across the 57 hedge funds surveyed by Goldman jumped by 16.1 per cent in 2025 from the year before, driven both by performance and new capital. In contrast, the rest of the hedge fund industry’s assets climbed by just 4.2 per cent.

A unique fee model has also enabled the multi-managers to bid up pay packages for top traders to $100mn or more.

Whereas traditional hedge funds would usually charge a 2 per cent management fee and 20 per cent on profits made for investors multi-manager hedge funds pass their expenses through to investors, enabling them to invest more in technology and traders to extend their advantage over rivals.

Under the model, costs including client entertainment, portfolio manager bonuses, and technology are charged directly to investors rather than incurred by the fund’s managers.

This has led to a blossoming of complex and ever-growing pay packages that trump what most portfolio managers can earn if they were to set up their own funds.

The sums of money managed by individual portfolio managers under the umbrella of the multi-manager firms has also jumped over the past three years.

Within the quartile of firms that allocate the largest amounts of capital to trade, portfolio managers are now responsible for books of as much as $1bn, a steep increase from the $563mn Goldman reported they were allocated in 2022.