Fitbit raised a whopping $732 million in its initial public offering after it priced at $20 — beyond the initial $17-$19 range — and a gamble with upsizing its offering paid off. Dealogic confirmed the Fitbit IPO was the largest consumer electronics IPO in history.
Teladoc also priced its IPO, which you can read about here.
The filing has generated strong reactions from a bullish outlook for the digital fitness company to exasperation with the market hype particularly given the steep drop in active users compared with registered users. “Selling is easy,” the Marketwire editorial cautioned. “Innovating is hard.” It also said:
Transforming Patient Care: The Role of AI-Powered Assistants
The progress in artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping patient care, across various dimensions, from facilitating faster discharge to curating treatment plans and suggesting lifestyle changes.
“The hard job of containing costs in the $3 trillion plus healthcare industry is creating opportunity for technology companies from Athenahealth to Cerner to IBM’s Watson Health program…But gadgets that measure fine distinctions in the propensity for heart disease in a demographic that has near zero occurrence of heart disease are not healthcare reform. It’s not serious.”
The merits of Fitbit in the wellness space have been in raising the profile of wearables and inspiring different approaches to accruing personal data, the potential to track different kinds of information easily and the potential to use these devices to engage people in their health, the latter having mixed results at best. Companies like Fitbit have inspired the development of more sophisticated devices that go far beyond what Fitbit has commercialized so far. Where would the wearables subsector of digital health be if Fitbit, Jawbone and other fitness tracking companies had never existed?
Jawbone‘s lawsuits against Fitbit over patent disputes and allegedly poaching staff from its ranks remain a significant concern.
The record-breaking IPO will likely distort consumer wellness fundraise charts by making it seem like the digital health market is stronger than it is.