A smart ring startup headquartered in Bengaluru wants to turn your finger into a gaming controller. Ultrahuman pulled in $70 million in early September to transform its health trackers into what CEO Mohit Kumar describes as miniature computers—complete with gesture controls, AI agents, and an app ecosystem that he says will arrive on existing devices by month's end.
The round, led by Qualcomm Ventures with $65 million in equity and $5 million in debt, values the company at roughly $365 million according to someone with knowledge of the terms. That marks about a threefold increase from its 2023 valuation, a trajectory that hinges on a bold premise: wearables are about to stop being passive sensors and start behaving like platforms.
Whether anyone actually wants a computer strapped to their ring finger remains an open question. Kumar's betting the form factor wins on sheer persistence. A ring doesn't come off for sleep or showers the way a watch might, and that continuous contact could unlock new uses if the hardware can handle them. By late September, he plans to test that theory with a software update that lets the company's Ring Air and Ring Pro models double as game controllers, weaving heart rate and skin temperature into gameplay mechanics.
"All ring devices today are like trackers," Kumar told TechCrunch in an interview Tuesday. "Ultrahuman's goal is to make the ring more like a computer, where programs and algorithms can run on the device itself."
That ambition depends on silicon. Ultrahuman is designing a new ring around Qualcomm processors to replace the Nordic Semiconductor chips it currently uses, a shift meant to bring compute power directly onto the hardware instead of farming work out to phones or cloud servers. Qualcomm introduced its Snapdragon Wear Elite Platform in February with an integrated neural processing unit for on-device AI, and released an AI-powered gaming graphics pipeline just a day before Ultrahuman's funding news surfaced. The timing may not be coincidental.
"The future of AI is personal, ambient, and always on," Quinn Li, Qualcomm's senior vice president and global head of its venture arm, said in a statement.
Ultrahuman plans to open its platform to third-party developers, though a review of Ultrahuman's developer documentation shows no public SDK or app distribution portal yet. Existing APIs let apps pull ring data through OAuth, but don't support running custom software on the ring hardware itself—something Kumar says is coming.
Ultrahuman has moved about 800,000 rings as of early September, up from 700,000 in February. Kumar pegs the company's current run rate at $140 million in annual revenue, a roughly 45% year-over-year climb, with a target of $200 million by early 2027. The U.S. drives 45% of quarterly revenue while India accounts for 11%. Around 12% of users pay for PowerPlugs, subscription add-ons that bundle features like Les Mills workout integration and migraine monitoring tools from Click Therapeutics.
The Ring Pro retails for $479 in the U.S., with shipping listed as "September 15th onwards" on the company's product page. It packs a 15-day battery and what Ultrahuman calls "ProRelease" emergency-removal safety cuts, a feature that sounds more reassuring than you'd hope it needs to be.
Kumar co-founded logistics startup Runnr, which Zomato acquired in September 2017, before launching Ultrahuman in 2019 with fellow Runnr alum Vatsal Singhal. They started with continuous glucose monitoring and added the smart ring in 2023. Other investors in this round include Labcorp Venture Fund, Alpha Wave, Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and Alteria Capital. Ultrahuman raised $35 million in March from Blume, Steadview Capital, Nexus, and Alpha Wave.
Labcorp's involvement suggests diagnostics integration on the horizon. "By combining longitudinal wearable data with deeper biological signals, Ultrahuman is creating new opportunities in personalized health," Megann Vaughn Watters, head of Labcorp Venture Fund, said.
The company rolled out its M2 Live platform in June with Abbott's over-the-counter Lingo continuous glucose monitor. It launched Jade, a real-time AI health assistant, in February, and released UltraSphere in July—a decision engine that churns out more than 60 personalized health recommendations based on location, weather, user profile, and biomarker data.
Ultrahuman lands in a suddenly crowded field. Oura filed to go public September 3, the same day Ultrahuman announced its funding, with an S-1 showing nine-month revenue topping $1 billion. Samsung launched its $399 Galaxy Ring in 2024 with tight integration across its device ecosystem. RingConn's Gen 3 sells for $349 with no subscription and added vascular health tracking this year. Circular unveiled its Ring 3 at IFA with NFC payments and blood pressure trend monitoring, while Amazfit's budget Helio Ring drew mixed reviews on accuracy from outlets like Wired.
The company also navigated a trade dispute with Oura that temporarily halted U.S. sales of its Ring Air model. An International Trade Commission determination found Ultrahuman violated Oura's patent claims, according to federal filings. Ultrahuman redesigned its Ring Pro and secured customs approval to re-enter the U.S. market, with pre-orders reopening in March.
Kumar said the software features coming this month represent an early step toward rings that do more than log steps and sleep stages. The company operates Pulsomics, an opt-in research program launched September 1 to build longitudinal datasets linking pulse signals with lifestyle factors. It employs somewhere around 488 people based on LinkedIn data, though the platform's company-size designation still lists it at 51 to 200 employees—a lag that reflects how fast the startup has scaled.
The larger question is whether computing on a finger makes intuitive sense to users outside the quantified-self crowd. Kumar thinks so. By late September, tens of thousands of existing customers will have a chance to test his vision—assuming they're willing to game with a ring that until recently was just counting their heartbeats.
