Ultrahuman, one of the leading rivals to Oura in the growing smart ring market, has raised around £55 million (roughly EUR 60 million) to fund the development of next-generation AI wearables. The investment, revealed on Thursday at IFA in Berlin, comes from Qualcomm Ventures, Labcorp, Alpha Wave, Blume and others, and signals ambitious plans for the company’s future devices.
The smart ring sector remains dominated by Oura, yet Ultrahuman has carved out a distinct position for itself. Over recent years, it has expanded rapidly into a broader health business, offering complementary products and services that include blood testing and an ambient sleep monitor designed to sit beside a user’s bed. Earlier this year, the firm launched the Ring Pro, which delivers improved battery life over previous models and, unlike several competitors, requires no subscription.
Gesture Control and a Wider AI Ecosystem
The new capital is intended to accelerate growth by placing the Ultrahuman Ring at the heart of an ecosystem where body data is put to more insightful and actionable use. The company plans to direct the funding towards sensing, materials, electrical engineering, algorithms, physiology and clinical science, with the aim of building future rings that make the human body more understandable through AI.
The tie-up with Qualcomm draws Ultrahuman into a much wider network of AI products, many of them wearable, with which the Ultrahuman Ring could eventually become interoperable. One example cited is the Meta Glasses, which the ring could be linked to for gesture control. According to Bhuvan Srinivasan, the company’s chief business officer, the vision is for a ring that controls what happens in the glasses during the day while also measuring sleep and health data at night, making it valuable around the clock.
This functionality will not be available on the Ring Pro. Srinivasan indicated that a new tier of ring is being developed specifically for this purpose in collaboration with the partners.
Blood Testing and Preventative Health
The partnership with diagnostics and pharmaceutical company Labcorp is also central to realising Ultrahuman’s plans, particularly through the support it can offer to Blood Vision, a preventative blood-testing service the company has been building over the past two years. Srinivasan explained that Blood Vision aims to bring together measurements that cannot be captured on a wearable but can be identified in blood, with the goal of making preventive health blood testing more mainstream.
The funding could help Ultrahuman establish itself as a link between personal health, AI agents and other AI-equipped devices. Quinn Li, senior vice president of Qualcomm Technologies and global head of Qualcomm Ventures, described Ultrahuman as pioneering a new generation of personal AI devices that make personalised insights effortless.
Ultrahuman unveiled the Ring Pro earlier this year, and the newly secured funding of approximately £55 million will underpin the development of its future ring hardware.
