Analysis
Ultrahuman, the Indian smart-ring maker, raised a $70 million round -- $65 million in equity and $5 million in debt -- led by Qualcomm Ventures at a $365 million valuation, TechCrunch reported. Labcorp, Alpha Wave, Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Alteria Capital also participated.
From Glucose Monitors to a Ring That Computes
Founded in 2019 by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal, Ultrahuman started with continuous glucose monitors before pivoting to wearable rings as its core business, later adding blood testing and environmental sensing to the platform. The company's current ambition, in Kumar's words, is "to make the ring more like a computer, where programs and algorithms can run on the device itself" -- moving beyond passive health tracking toward on-device AI interactions, game-controller functions, car-key capability and third-party developer support. Qualcomm's contribution is specifically silicon: the company will supply chips for Ultrahuman's next-generation ring, complementing its existing Nordic Semiconductor components and enabling more on-device processing with less cloud dependency -- a meaningfully different kind of strategic backing than a pure financial check, since it ties Ultrahuman's product roadmap directly to Qualcomm's chip development cycle.
“Kumar says the company is now seeing demand 18 to 20 times available supply.”
The Numbers Behind the Multiple
At a $365 million valuation on a $140 million revenue run rate growing 45% year over year, Ultrahuman is pricing at roughly 2.6x trailing revenue -- a conservative multiple by 2026 AI-hardware standards, where names like Lyte have priced well above 10x. That's roughly 3x Ultrahuman's own $120 million valuation from 2023, but the underlying growth is real and disclosed, which is more than can be said for several other markup stories Pulse has covered this quarter. The company has sold roughly 800,000 rings, with the US now accounting for 45% of revenue against 11% from India -- a genuine reversal from what would be expected of an India-founded hardware company, and evidence that Ultrahuman's redesigned Ring Pro found real demand after returning to the US market in 2026 following patent-dispute restrictions. Kumar says the company is now seeing demand 18 to 20 times available supply.
Oura Is the Story Everyone Will Compare This To
The timing here is impossible to ignore: Ultrahuman's round lands the same week Oura filed publicly for a US IPO targeting a valuation above $16 billion, with revenue up 74% to $1.21 billion over nine months. Oura remains the category's dominant player by both revenue and valuation, and Ultrahuman's 12% subscription-software attach rate on its PowerPlugs features lags well behind the recurring-revenue mix that makes Oura's IPO pitch work as a software-like multiple rather than a pure hardware one. Ultrahuman's path to relevance is differentiation on price and on-device computing ambition rather than head-on scale competition -- a smaller, faster-moving challenger racing to build real software moats before Oura's IPO capital lets it out-spend on the same category.
What's Next
Ultrahuman's own management has set 2028 as the earliest realistic IPO window, contingent on eight consecutive quarters of profitability -- a far more conservative public-market timeline than Oura's, and one that suggests Ultrahuman sees itself as the disciplined operator in a category where its larger rival is now betting on public-market patience for a business still posting widening losses alongside revenue growth.