Smart rings just got a serious chip upgrade. India-based wearable maker Ultrahuman has closed a $70 million funding round backed by Qualcomm, with the two companies now building a next-generation ring powered by Qualcomm silicon. The deal signals a major bet that wearables are shifting from simple fitness trackers into pocket-sized computers, and Ultrahuman is targeting a $200 million annual revenue run rate by January 2027, according to TechCrunch.
Smart rings have mostly been glorified sleep trackers wrapped in titanium, but that's about to change. Ultrahuman, the Bangalore-born wearable startup, just closed a $70 million funding round with an unusual lead investor: chipmaker Qualcomm, through its venture arm Qualcomm Ventures. The round, first reported by TechCrunch, also pulled in returning backers Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures, along with a notable strategic name in lab testing giant Labcorp.
The money isn't just going toward marketing budgets or hiring sprees. Ultrahuman and Qualcomm are jointly building a new generation of smart ring hardware, one that leans on Qualcomm's chip expertise to push the tiny form factor into genuine computing territory. That's a notable pivot for a device category that's largely been defined by battery-sipping sensors quietly logging heart rate variability and body temperature overnight. Qualcomm's involvement suggests the next wave of rings could handle more processing on-device, rather than shipping raw data off to a phone app for the heavy lifting.
[Image placeholder: Ultrahuman Ring AIR product shot]
Ultrahuman isn't shy about its ambitions either. The company is targeting a $200 million annual revenue run rate by January 2027, a figure that, if hit, would mark a dramatic scale-up for a startup that's spent the last few years fighting for shelf space against far bigger names. That kind of growth target puts Ultrahuman on a collision course with Oura, the Finnish ring maker that's long dominated the category, and Samsung, which entered the ring race with its own Galaxy Ring and has the manufacturing muscle to undercut smaller rivals on price.
The timing matters. Wearable health tech has been one of the few hardware categories consistently growing even as broader consumer electronics spending cools, and investors have taken notice. Chipmakers, meanwhile, have been hunting for the next big edge-computing use case now that phones and PCs are largely saturated markets. A smart ring that can run more sophisticated health algorithms locally, without draining a coin-cell-sized battery in a day, is exactly the kind of low-power, high-margin opportunity Qualcomm has been chasing as it diversifies beyond smartphone modems.
Labcorp's presence in the round is arguably the more interesting signal for where Ultrahuman wants to go next. Pairing a consumer wearable with an actual clinical lab testing giant hints at ambitions well beyond step counts and sleep scores, think blood biomarker integration, personalized health insights validated against real diagnostic data, and a push toward positioning the ring as a genuine health monitoring tool rather than a lifestyle gadget. That's territory Apple and Samsung have both eyed with their own health platforms, but neither has fully cracked the clinical-grade credibility problem the way a Labcorp partnership might help Ultrahuman attempt.
Competitively, this round puts pressure on the entire smart ring field to justify its next moves. Oura has raised hundreds of millions at multibillion-dollar valuations and built a loyal subscription base around its app, while Samsung's Galaxy Ring benefits from bundling with the broader Galaxy ecosystem. Ultrahuman's pitch has always leaned on being the more open, metrics-heavy alternative for serious biohackers and athletes. A Qualcomm-powered chip could let it differentiate further on raw capability rather than just software polish, assuming the hardware actually ships on the timeline the company is promising.
What happens between now and that January 2027 revenue target will say a lot about whether smart rings can graduate from niche quantified-self accessory to mainstream health computer. If Ultrahuman and Qualcomm pull off a ring that does meaningfully more on-device processing while keeping the tiny form factor and week-long battery life users expect, it could reset expectations for the entire category. If not, this round becomes another example of a chipmaker placing a speculative bet on wearables that never quite finds its mainstream moment. Either way, the next generation of smart rings just got a lot more interesting to watch.
For readers tracking where wearable tech is headed, this deal is a signal worth remembering: chipmakers are betting real money that health wearables need more computing muscle, not just better sensors. Whether Ultrahuman can turn a $70 million round and a Qualcomm partnership into $200 million in annual revenue by 2027 will be an early test of whether smart rings can break out of their niche and become the next must-have piece of personal computing, sitting quietly on your finger instead of in your pocket.
