Smart Rings Are Quietly Outgrowing Smartwatches, and Ultrahuman Just Proved It Can Be Profitable
Ultrahuman posted $64 million in revenue and its first-ever profit in fiscal 2025, a 5.4x jump that helped it land a $70 million round led by Qualcomm Ventures — part of a smart ring category now growing faster than smartwatches.
While smartwatch sales plateau, the tiny sensor-packed ring on your finger has become the wearable industry’s fastest-growing category — and, for the first time, one of its most profitable. Ultrahuman, the India-founded smart ring maker, reported operating revenue of $64 million for the fiscal year ended March 2025, a 5.4x jump year-on-year, alongside its first-ever net profit of $8.2 million. The numbers landed just as Qualcomm Ventures led a fresh $70 million round into the company, underscoring how much capital is chasing a product category that barely existed five years ago.
The Headline Numbers
Ultrahuman’s FY25 results, covering the year ended March 2025, showed $64 million in operating revenue against $8.2 million in net profit, with an EBITDA margin around 8.76%, figures the company and Indian business press have described as a roughly 5x revenue surge that flipped Ultrahuman from a loss-making startup into a profitable one in a single fiscal year. By September 2026, the company said its annualized revenue run rate had climbed further to about $140 million, up roughly 45% from a year earlier, with a target of $200 million by January 2027. Ultrahuman has sold around 800,000 rings cumulatively, up from 700,000 just seven months earlier, and the U.S. now accounts for 45% of its revenue, with demand for its newer Ring Pro reportedly running 18 to 20 times available supply.
Fresh Capital, Bigger Ambitions
On September 3, 2026, Ultrahuman announced a $70 million Series C, split between $65 million in equity and $5 million in debt, led by Qualcomm Ventures with participation from Labcorp, Alpha Wave, Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Alteria Capital. The round values the company at $365 million, roughly triple its $120 million valuation in 2023. Founder and CEO Mohit Kumar framed the investment around a bigger bet than fitness tracking, saying all ring devices today are like trackers, and that Ultrahuman’s goal is to make the ring more like a computer, pointing to plans for a Qualcomm-powered ring with expanded onboard computing and forthcoming software updates that add game-controller functionality and richer AI interaction. Qualcomm Ventures’ Quinn Li tied the bet to a broader thesis about where AI hardware is headed: the future of AI is personal, ambient, and always on.
A Category-Wide Boom
Ultrahuman’s growth isn’t happening in isolation. Market researchers project the global smart ring market growing at a compound annual rate of roughly 25% to 32% through the early 2030s, with unit shipments expected to top 8 million globally in 2026 — a pace that’s outstripping smartwatch growth, which has matured into a slower-growing, more saturated category. Industry estimates suggest close to 40% of newly launched wearables in 2026 include some form of AI-driven health feature, and surveys show roughly 70% of consumers now prioritize health-monitoring capabilities like heart rate, blood oxygen and ECG readings when choosing a wearable device, a shift that favors ring form factors built almost entirely around continuous biometric sensing.
Why Rings, Specifically
Executives and analysts point to a few structural reasons rings are growing faster than watches: longer battery life, unobtrusive all-day wear that doesn’t interfere with sleep tracking, and a lower price point that makes rings an easier upsell for health-conscious buyers who already own a smartwatch. Ultrahuman’s own numbers hint at where the next profit pool sits — its software subscription business, while still just $3.2 million of FY25 revenue, carries far higher margins than hardware sales and is growing quickly as a share of the mix, with 12% of users now paying for premium software features.
The Skeptic’s View
Not everyone treats the smart ring boom as a sure thing. Wearable industry analysts have long noted that health-tracking hardware categories tend to see early hype cycles followed by plateauing repeat-purchase rates, since a ring, unlike a smartphone, has no obvious two-year upgrade cycle once someone owns one that works. There are also open questions about clinical validity: most ring-based health claims, including cycle and stress predictions, are validated internally by the companies selling the devices rather than through large independent trials, and regulators have generally treated these as wellness products rather than medical devices, meaning the accuracy bar is lower than the marketing sometimes implies. Ultrahuman’s push into general-purpose computing, rather than staying focused on health sensing, also raises the question of whether it can out-execute Apple, Samsung and Oura on both fronts at once.
What’s Next
Ultrahuman says its Qualcomm-powered, more computer-like ring is coming, alongside software updates due by the end of September 2026. With Qualcomm now both an investor and a chip supplier, and Labcorp in the round hinting at deeper clinical-data ambitions, the next year will test whether smart rings can graduate from single-purpose health trackers into a genuine new computing form factor — or whether that’s a harder leap than the fundraising suggests.
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