Qualcomm backs Ultrahuman's $70M bet on rings that compute
Two smart-ring stories landed within hours of each other on Thursday, and read together they describe the same pivot: the ring is done being a sensor, and everyone is racing to decide what it becomes next.
Qualcomm Ventures has joined a $70 million round in Ultrahuman, valuing the Bengaluru company at about $365 million — and the real prize in the deal is silicon, not money. Ultrahuman is building a new ring around Qualcomm's chips, replacing the Nordic Semiconductor part it uses today, which founder and CEO Mohit Kumar says will let software and algorithms run on the ring itself instead of on a paired phone or in the cloud. "All ring devices today are like trackers," Kumar said — you put it on, it measures your heart rate, your movement, your sleep. His pitch is that a ring that computes locally can be a pointer, a game controller, a car key, and an interface for talking to an AI, with developers eventually writing their own programs for it.
The size of the round differs by source — TechCrunch reports $65 million in primary equity plus $5 million in debt, while Indian outlets put the equity at around $60 million — but the participants are not in dispute: Labcorp, Alpha Wave, Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and Alteria Capital all joined.
The business underneath that pitch is more real than most hardware origin stories. Ultrahuman is running at about $140 million in annual revenue, up roughly 45% year over year, has sold around 800,000 rings, and gets about 12% of users to pay for its PowerPlugs subscription features. Qualcomm's Quinn Li framed the investment as a bet that "the future of AI is personal, ambient and always on" — which is also a bet that the winning ambient device is one you already forget you're wearing. The catch is the same one that sank a decade of smartwatches: a ring that runs third-party software needs a reason for anyone to write it, and "your heart rate and body temperature as a game input" is a demo, not yet a platform. Kumar also conceded the company may not be profitable this year as it pours money into stores, clinical studies, and the India and UAE expansion.
Circular used IFA to make the same argument from the other direction, shipping a Ring 3 series that puts payments and haptics on the finger. The Ring 3 Pro adds FDA-cleared ECG for Afib detection, blood pressure trend tracking, glucose tracking, and up to 12 days of battery life, up from seven; a thinner Ring 3 Slim keeps the core sleep, heart rate, HRV, SpO₂, and temperature tracking plus NFC payments for people who, as CEO Amaury Kosman put it, don't want every health feature. Both models vibrate on the finger for silent alarms, medication reminders, and health alerts — a small detail that matters more than it sounds, because haptics are what turn a passive tracker into something that can get your attention without a screen. Pricing is still unannounced and the rings aren't expected until early 2027, which is a long runway for Oura, reportedly eyeing an IPO, to answer.
A YC-backed startup called Mireye launched infrastructure aimed at the opposite end of the physical-world AI boom: agents that need facts about places. The pitch is one API, exposed through MCP tools, that hands an agent cited data about any US location — flood zone, slope, distance to the nearest transmission line, soil drainage, drive-time to a substation — with typed refusals when a match isn't good enough rather than a confident guess. The early customers named are data center siting, renewable energy siting, insurance underwriting, and mortgage and title work, which is a tidy map of where money is currently being spent on the physical buildout of AI. It's a launch, not a proven product, but "agents that can be wrong about a place" is a real failure mode and someone has to sell the antidote.
What to watch: whether Ultrahuman ships an actual developer kit for its Qualcomm-powered ring, or whether "computer on your finger" stays a fundraising line.
Would you let a ring on your finger run third-party apps — or is a tracker that never buzzes the whole point? Tell us in the comments.
