Ultrahuman raised $70m to turn its ring into a computer

Ultrahuman has raised $70m, and the pitch it made to get the money is not a better sleep score. The Indian company wants its smart ring to stop being a tracker and start running software.

TechCrunch’s Jagmeet Singh reported the round first, with an interview with founder and chief executive Mohit Kumar. It is $65m in equity and $5m in debt. Qualcomm Ventures took part. So did the diagnostics group Labcorp, Alpha Wave, Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Alteria Capital. A person familiar with the terms told the outlet it values Bengaluru-based Ultrahuman at $365m, roughly three times its 2023 mark.

Qualcomm Ventures is the name that matters. It has backed hardware that went on to define a category before, including Ring and Fitbit. It is not buying a sleep tracker here.

The plan is a ring that runs its own code

Ultrahuman is building a new ring on Qualcomm silicon, alongside the Nordic Semiconductor chips it uses now. The extra processing lets more work happen on the finger rather than on a phone or in the cloud.

Kumar was blunt about where the category sits today. “All ring devices today are like trackers,” he said. He wants the ring to behave like a computer, with programs running on the device itself.

The uses he floated are mostly not health ones. A pointer or a mouse. A game controller. A car key. An interface for talking to AI. Third-party developers would write for it. That is the part that turns a product into a platform.

Some of it is not waiting for new hardware. Ultrahuman says a software update by the end of September will let the existing Ring Air and Ring Pro work as game controllers. The same update connects them to AI applications. The same update opens the rings to outside developers.

The case for a ring over a watch is contact. “A game controller never reads your heart rate and your temperature, but this one does,” Kumar said. He imagines games that respond to a player’s heart rate and body temperature as well as their movement.

The real target is the thing on your face

Speaking to CNET at IFA in Berlin, chief business officer Bhuvan Srinivasan named the device Ultrahuman wants to pair with. He described a ring that controls smart glasses by gesture during the day and measures sleep at night. Meta’s glasses were his example.

He was clear the current model will not do it. There will be another ring level, he said, being built with Qualcomm.

That fits what Qualcomm has been saying for a year. In June it launched a white-label toolkit for AI glasses and a chip line to go with it, betting the next platform is not a phone. Glasses need an input device that is not your voice in a crowded room. A ring on the hand that already reads your physiology is a plausible answer. Qualcomm now has a position in one.

It got here after losing its biggest market

Ultrahuman spent much of the past year locked out of the US. The International Trade Commission ruled against it in a patent case brought by Oura in September 2025. The Ring Air came off sale there while the company redesigned it.

It returned this year with the Ring Pro. Kumar says US demand is now running at 18 to 20 times the supply Ultrahuman can meet. He expects volumes to reach pre-ban levels next quarter, and to triple over the four quarters after that.

The US accounted for about 45% of revenue this quarter and India about 11%. Some of the new money goes into physical stores in India and the UAE, where Ultrahuman says offline space sells rings that online listings do not.

The business underneath the ambition

Ultrahuman says it is on an annual revenue run rate of $140m, up roughly 45% year on year, and expects to reach $200m by January 2027. It has sold around 800,000 rings, up from about 700,000 in February.

It has also been widening the product rather than only shipping more rings. There is a continuous glucose monitor. That is where the company started in 2019, before the ring took over. There is environmental sensing. And there is Blood Vision, a preventative blood-testing service it has spent two years building, which is why Labcorp is on the cap table rather than merely in the round.

The two are exploring whether blood-flow signals from the ring, read against blood-test results, can flag risks in cardiovascular health and fertility. That is a harder claim than sleep scoring and it will need evidence, but it is the second business.

The cost of all of it is that Ultrahuman expects to lose money this year, after spending on retail, brand and clinical research. Kumar wants about eight quarters of profitability before listing. He thinks that takes eight to ten quarters to build, which puts any IPO at 2028 at the earliest.

Nobody at IFA was selling a tracker

The timing is not a coincidence. Days before Ultrahuman’s announcement, Circular used the same show to launch two rings with contactless payments and haptic alerts. Garmin arrived in July with a screenless band that skips the membership fee.

Screenless wearables have spent two years taking share from smartwatches. The ones arriving now compete on what the device can do, not on what it can measure. The Ultrahuman smart ring charges for PowerPlugs, its software add-ons, and the company says about 12% of users pay. The ring itself does not require a subscription.

That is the pressure the category leader named for investors in its IPO filing. Oura, which filed to go public four days into the same week, tells the market it competes with lower-cost rings that carry no subscription fee, and that this creates pricing pressure. Ultrahuman has just raised $70m to make that pressure about something other than price.