The ring doesn't look like much at first glance. Titanium band, understated ceramic inlay, the kind of thing you might mistake for wedding jewelry. But tap it against a coffee shop terminal, and suddenly you're paying without fishing for your phone, wallet, or the credit card that's definitely somewhere in your bag.
For Muse Wearables, a Bengaluru startup that's been quietly working on this problem since 2015, the October 2025 launch of Ring One represents something more ambitious than a gadget. The company, which came out of IIT Madras, announced a partnership with the National Payments Corporation of India that month to build what it's positioning as the country's first wearable payments ecosystem—running on RuPay tokenization and activated by, well, wearing a ring.
The timing is deliberate, perhaps more so than Muse initially expected. NPCI has been pushing hard into what it calls "ambient payments"—transactions that happen without pulling out your phone or scanning a QR code. Just days before Muse took the stage at Global Fintech Fest 2025, NPCI was showing off UPI Lite running on smart glasses. India's contactless landscape is evolving fast, and everyone seems to be racing toward a future where payments disappear into the background of daily life.
But Muse's play is different. Ring One operates on RuPay card rails via NFC—near-field communication, the same tap-to-pay technology that's been standard in credit cards for years—rather than UPI's QR-based payment flows. It's a premium positioning in a market where most smart wearables obsess over heart rate and sleep tracking, not whether you can buy groceries without opening your phone.
The Technical Stack (and the Security Promise)
At the core sits the Muse Wallet app, which takes linked RuPay debit or credit cards and converts them into tokens stored inside a tamper-resistant Secure Element built into the ring itself. The architecture keeps your actual card number—the PAN data banks guard so carefully—isolated from phone operating systems and apps. Transactions happen entirely within the ring's SE, and only when you're actually wearing it.
The guts of the system rely on Infineon for secure element technology. Components from Renesas—specifically tech acquired from Panthronics—handle both NFC payments and wireless charging through a single antenna design, a neat engineering trick that eliminates the need for charging ports that would compromise waterproofing. According to a company post from October 2023, the system carries GlobalPlatform certification, EMVCo L1/L2 compliance, and PCI-DSS backend security. Those are product claims, mind you, not independently verified benchmarks, but they represent the table stakes for any device trying to handle payments data.
Ring One itself is built from Grade 2 titanium and zirconia ceramic. It's rated for 100 meters of water resistance—you can swim in it, apparently—with battery life somewhere in the six to seven day range. Charging happens wirelessly via NFC, no cables required.
Then there's the pricing, which is where things get interesting. The titanium and titanium-ceramic variants start at ₹28,999 (around $340). If that's not enough of a statement, Muse offers an 18-carat gold version listed at ₹99,999—roughly $1,175—that packs six to seven grams of solid gold. That's well above health-tracking competitors like Noise's Luna Ring at ₹14,999, and even Samsung's Galaxy Ring at ₹38,999. This isn't a device for everyone. Muse seems to know that.
The RuPay Gambit
The NPCI partnership centers on RuPay tokenization, which enables Ring One users to tap at any NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminal in India without pulling out a phone, wallet, or physical card. CEO KLN Sai Prasanth named LivQuik as the first issuer partner during the October announcement, though the company says it's been onboarding additional issuing banks with the stated ambition to eventually support all RuPay issuers. That's the ambition, anyway. The reality depends on individual banks enabling tokenization for their customers—a process that rarely moves as quickly as startups hope.
Outside India, Muse claims Ring One already works with cards from roughly 600 banks across more than 40 countries, primarily via Mastercard's network. The October announcement framed the RuPay integration as something of a sovereign alternative to foreign wallet systems like Apple Pay or Google Wallet, though whether that narrative resonates with consumers is anyone's guess.
The "first" claim requires some context, though. NPCI showcased a contactless payment ring called the OTG Ring from LivQuik at Global Fintech Fest back in 2023. Axis Bank launched NFC payment bands with GOQii in 2016, followed by Wear-N-Pay bands and keychains in 2021. What distinguishes Muse's announcement isn't necessarily being first to market with wearable payments, but the framing around a complete ecosystem—the combination of SE tokenization platform, multi-issuer support, and a consumer-facing ring product under one integrated system. Whether that distinction matters in practice is another question entirely.
Swimming Against the Health-Tracking Tide
The Indian smart ring category has gotten crowded, fast. Ultrahuman has been pushing aggressively with the Ring Air and Ring Pro, the latter featuring 15-day battery life and AI-driven health insights. Noise and boAt have launched budget-friendly health trackers in ring form. Samsung entered late in 2024 with the Galaxy Ring, emphasizing sleep tracking and fitness metrics.
None of them compete directly on payments. The smart ring conversation in India has been overwhelmingly health-first—heart rate variability, sleep stages, activity tracking, all the metrics that fitness enthusiasts obsess over. Muse is attempting to carve out a payments-centric niche in a market where NFC infrastructure at merchants has been growing, albeit unevenly, and where consumers are already comfortable with contactless transactions via cards and UPI.
The challenge is twofold. First, convincing users that a ring offers meaningful convenience over tapping a phone or card—a behavior they've already adopted. Second, justifying a ₹28,999 price point when most smart rings sell for a fraction of that. Muse's bet seems to be on premium positioning, targeting early adopters willing to pay for integrated health metrics and seamless payments, though the company's marketing has leaned heavily on the payments angle since the NPCI announcement. Whether health features can justify the premium, or whether payments functionality alone can carry that price, remains to be seen.
The Long Road to Ring One
Muse Wearables, formally operated by Conzumex Industries Pvt. Ltd., was founded in 2015 by KLN Sai Prasanth (CEO), K.A. Yathindra Ajay (CPO), and K. Prathyusha (COO). The company started with hybrid smartwatches and health trackers before pivoting to Ring One—a shift that reflects the broader strategic bet on payments.
Funding has been modest. The last disclosed raise was ₹22 crore (roughly $2.9 million) in July 2020, led by Bhaskar Rao Bollineni, founder of KIMS Hospitals, with participation from earlier backers including filmmaker SS Rajamouli, Lead Angels, and Keiretsu Forum. Prior rounds from 2017-2019 totaled around ₹6.85 crore, according to trade media reports. As of October 2025, the company said it had a 200-member deeptech team designing and manufacturing in India, with operations extending to the US and Europe. No fresh capital has been disclosed publicly since 2020.
Ring One's path to market was anything but smooth. The company launched an Indiegogo campaign in late September 2023, raising close to $1.7 million from around 7,500 backers—a solid showing that validated initial demand. Then came the delays. Shipping timelines slipped repeatedly through 2024 and into early 2025, drawing frustration in crowdfunding forums and Reddit threads. By November 2024, consumer tech blogs were tracking "delays again," with revised targets pointing to early 2025 deliveries.
Community posts from late 2025 suggest some backers received units, while others continued reporting slow customer service and unresolved order issues. These are anecdotal and unverified complaints, the kind that plague most hardware crowdfunding campaigns, but they underscore the execution risk in hardware startups attempting complex integrations across secure payments, health sensors, and miniaturized electronics. Getting the demo to work is one thing. Manufacturing and shipping thousands of units to paying customers is another beast entirely.
The Hard Part Starts Now
The October 2025 launch positioned Ring One as live for NFC payments globally via Mastercard and in India via RuPay, though bank-by-bank support lists remain unpublished. The practical test is whether Muse can onboard enough issuing banks quickly enough to make the product broadly usable—and whether merchants accept it without friction at the point of sale. NFC infrastructure in India isn't universal, despite rapid growth. Small merchants, particularly outside tier-1 cities, often lack NFC-enabled terminals, relying instead on UPI QR codes taped to countertops.
NPCI's broader push toward ambient payments—evidenced by the UPI Lite smart glasses announcement just days before Muse's showcase—suggests institutional appetite for payments beyond phones. Whether that translates into consumer behavior change is an open question, particularly at premium price points in a notoriously price-sensitive market. India's middle class is growing, and some segment of consumers will pay for convenience and status. But the market for ₹28,999 smart rings that primarily do payments? That's still unproven territory.
For fintech executives and product leaders exploring contactless form factors, Muse's approach offers a case study in navigating India's payments infrastructure: leveraging RuPay tokenization, partnering with NPCI for credibility, and attempting to differentiate in a crowded wearables market not through health metrics alone, but through integrated payments functionality. The technology seems sound, at least on paper. The business model is the question mark.
Hardware is unforgiving. Margins are thin, supply chains are fragile, and customers expect perfection. Payments infrastructure requires trust at scale—trust that takes years to build and seconds to lose. Those two challenges don't resolve simply because the technology works in a demo at Global Fintech Fest. They resolve through execution, bank partnerships, merchant adoption, and the thousand small decisions that determine whether a product becomes indispensable or ends up in a drawer collecting dust.
Muse has built the ring. Now comes the hard part: convincing India it needs one.
