Beyond Health Tracking: Ultrahuman Bags $70M to Build Smart Rings That Run Software
Smart rings have spent the past several years playing a very straightforward game. They sit quietly on your finger, measure your sleep stages, track your resting heart rate, and log skin temperature before dumping those metrics into a smartphone app. For most people, that is where the utility ends. But Ultrahuman has much bigger ambitions for your finger.
The Bengaluru-born health tech startup has officially secured $70 million in a fresh funding round led by Qualcomm Ventures. The investment pushes Ultrahuman’s valuation to $365 million—roughly triple its worth in 2023. Additional backing came from Labcorp and Alteria Capital, alongside returning participants from the company's 2024 Series B round.
For Qualcomm Ventures, which has a long history of backing category-defining hardware players like Ring and Fitbit, as well as modern infrastructure startups like Ethernovia and Zuddl, this investment is a calculated bet. They aren't just funding another incremental update to sleep tracking. They are investing in the thesis that smart rings can evolve from passive biometric monitors into active edge-computing platforms capable of running on-device software, AI interactions, and gaming controls.
Bouncing Back From the Oura Patent Dispute
Reaching this stage required navigating some severe turbulence. Just eleven months prior to closing this $70 million round, Ultrahuman was hit hard by a legal and regulatory storm. A United States International Trade Commission (ITC) patent dispute involving market titan Oura resulted in an unwelcome sales ban on Ultrahuman's rings in the US market.
Because the United States accounted for approximately half of Ultrahuman’s entire customer base at the time, the prohibition was a near-fatal blow. Founders Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal—who previously launched the logistics venture Runnr before selling it to Zomato in 2019—were forced to spend months completely redesigning the Ring Pro hardware to engineer around the patent claims and clear the path for a stateside return.
That pivot appears to have worked better than expected. According to Kumar, current US demand for the redesigned device is running at an astonishing 18 to 20 times the company’s current manufacturing capacity. Management anticipates matching pre-ban sales volumes in the US next quarter, with plans to triple those figures within the year.
Designing a Ring to Run Software and AI at the Edge
The capital injection from Qualcomm and its co-investors isn't just about replenishing war chests after a legal battle; it is fueling a radical architectural shift. Ultrahuman is currently developing a brand-new hardware iteration that will integrate Qualcomm silicon alongside the Nordic Semiconductor chips that currently anchor its devices.
This dual-chip strategy is designed to enable true on-device processing. Instead of piping raw sensor data back to a smartphone or relying constantly on cloud compute connections, future rings will handle local computation directly on the finger.
Users won't even have to wait for the next physical ring release to see this philosophy in action. Ultrahuman has scheduled a major software update for its existing Ring Air and Ring Pro models. This update introduces features that allow the rings to act as game controllers, interface directly with artificial intelligence models, and open up an application programming interface (API) for third-party developers to build custom mini-apps.
It is an audacious engineering challenge. Balancing high-performance computing capabilities and complex AI interactions inside a four-gram titanium shell while maintaining multi-day battery life requires pushing hardware limits. Yet Ultrahuman is banking on the idea that users are ready for wearable tech that transcends passive health dashboards.
Financial Momentum and the Cutthroat Smart Ring Landscape
Ultrahuman’s internal metrics suggest aggressive top-line momentum. The company reports an annual revenue run rate of $140 million—a 45% increase compared to the previous year—with a stated target of hitting $200 million by January 2027. Total cumulative ring sales have climbed to approximately 800,000 units, up from 700,000 in February. Meanwhile, roughly 12% of its active user base subscribes to its PowerPlugs software add-on ecosystem. Despite these figures, the company remains unprofitable as it pours capital into R&D, global supply chains, and market expansion.
Even with this growth, Ultrahuman operates in an increasingly crowded and well-funded arena. Oura remains the undisputed heavyweight of the category, holding a dominant 76.4% market share in a global smart ring industry valued at $697.6 million in 2025 and projected to expand to $7.8 billion by 2035. Oura is reportedly planning a massive US stock market debut at a valuation exceeding $16 billion—dwarfing Ultrahuman's current valuation by more than fortyfold. Wrist-worn rival Whoop commands a $10.1 billion valuation, while tech giants like Samsung have entered the fray with subscription-free hardware alternatives like the Galaxy Ring.
Whether everyday users will embrace a smart ring as an active computing device, an AI conduit, or a gaming controller remains to be seen. But with Qualcomm backing its hardware ambitions and a rapidly expanding global footprint, Ultrahuman is firmly positioned to test the outer boundaries of what a ring can do.
