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Startup Deep Dive : Ultrahuman — profitable for the first time, right as the US banned its flagship ring

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Ultrahuman.

In the financial year ending March 2025, Ultrahuman posted its first-ever annual profit: Rs 73 crore ($7.6 million) on revenue of Rs 565 crore ($58.9 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0), a fivefold jump from the year before. It happened in the same twelve months that the United States — the market generating close to half its sales — moved to ban the import of the company’s flagship smart ring.

The Bengaluru-based maker of the Ring AIR and the M1 glucose monitor had spent five years losing money to build a metabolic-health business around a piece of jewellery. Then, weeks after it turned the corner, a US patent ruling threatened to take its biggest market away. This is the story of how a fitness app that pivoted to hardware became India’s best-known wearable export, and how it is trying to out-engineer a legal setback it did not choose.

Quick facts

Company Ultrahuman (Ultrahuman Healthcare Private Limited)
Founded 2019, Bengaluru
Founder(s) Mohit Kumar (CEO) and Vatsal Singhal
Businesses Smart rings (Ring AIR, Ring PRO), continuous glucose monitoring (M1), at-home blood testing (Blood Vision), subscription software (PowerPlugs)
Latest FY revenue Rs 565 crore ($58.9 million), revenue from operations, FY25 (year ended March 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss Rs 73 crore net profit, FY25 — first profitable year
Listed Private; company has said an IPO is unlikely before 2028
Market value / last valuation $365 million (reported), Series C, September 2026
Key shareholders / CEO Mohit Kumar (co-founder & CEO); investors include Qualcomm Ventures, Alpha Wave, Blume Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital and Labcorp

What they do

Ultrahuman sells wearable and at-home diagnostic devices that turn sleep, activity, blood sugar and blood chemistry into daily scores and recommendations, targeting consumers who already track their fitness and are willing to pay a subscription on top of the hardware. The company’s own reporting shows where the weight actually sits: smart rings alone made up 91.3% of FY25 operating revenue, with subscriptions and other services making up the rest (as per Entrackr’s review of Ultrahuman’s FY25 financial filing, September 2025).

The origin

Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal had known each other for roughly sixteen years by the time they started Ultrahuman in 2019. Their previous venture was a logistics startup that they built and eventually sold to Zomato, giving them a taste of scaling operations before either had built a health product (Wikipedia, accessed September 2026).

The idea for Ultrahuman traces to a martial-arts camp in Thailand, where Kumar was training in Muay Thai and found himself paying closer attention to the data around his performance — heart rate, recovery, sleep — than to the training itself. That observation hardened into the company’s founding question, repeated in its own materials since: why do people understand their phones better than they understand their own bodies (Fitt Insider; Wikipedia, accessed September 2026)? Ultrahuman started as a software product, an app meant to unify fitness and sleep tracking across existing wearables, before the company concluded that software alone could not deliver the accuracy it wanted and moved into building its own hardware.

The struggle years

The pivot from app to hardware was not a clean one. Ultrahuman’s own app launched at CES in Los Angeles in January 2021, more than a year after incorporation, and the company’s first hardware product, the M1 continuous glucose monitor, followed only in June 2021 (Wikipedia, accessed September 2026). Building and shipping a regulated medical-adjacent device from a two-year-old Bengaluru startup meant the unit economics were ugly for years afterward: in FY23, Ultrahuman lost Rs 71 crore on just Rs 30 crore of revenue — spending roughly Rs 3.37 to earn every rupee — a loss ratio that would have sunk a company without patient venture backing (Entrackr, January 2025).

The CGM business also ran into a slower, quieter setback: regulatory delay in its largest addressable market. Ultrahuman launched the M1 in the UK, the Netherlands and India in June 2021, but did not get the device into the US, the world’s biggest wellness-tech market, until February 2024 — a gap of close to three years in which competitors could establish themselves with American consumers and clinicians (TechRadar; Wikipedia, accessed September 2026).

The most recent and most damaging setback arrived just as the company turned profitable. On 21 October 2025, an exclusion order from the US International Trade Commission took effect, barring new imports of the Ring AIR into the United States after the ITC found Ultrahuman had infringed a component-arrangement patent held by rival Oura (Businesswire, September 2025; Gadgets and Wearables, 22 October 2025). The US had accounted for close to 45% of Ultrahuman’s roughly 700,000 daily active users worldwide at the time, making it by far the company’s largest market (TechCrunch, 27 February 2026).

The turning point

If there is a single event that turned Ultrahuman from a niche glucose-monitoring company into a wearables business with a real shot at scale, it was the decision to get into smart rings at all. The company acquired LazyCo, a wearables IoT outfit with smart-ring technology, in April 2022, and shipped its first Ultrahuman Ring three months later, in July 2022 (Wikipedia, accessed September 2026). Before that acquisition, Ultrahuman was a single-product CGM company competing in a category most consumers had never heard of; its entire FY23 revenue, mostly from that CGM business plus the very first ring sales, was Rs 30 crore.

By FY25, smart rings alone brought in Rs 516 crore — more than seventeen times the company’s total revenue just two years earlier — and made up 91.3% of Ultrahuman’s operating revenue (Entrackr, September 2025). A bet on a form factor that did not exist in the company’s product line before mid-2022 had, within three fiscal years, become almost the entire business.

The money behind it

Ultrahuman has raised more than $130 million across four disclosed institutional rounds since 2020, moving from early-stage Indian VCs to a corporate strategic investor as the product line matured:

Qualcomm’s participation changed the nature of the relationship from purely financial to strategic: the two companies are jointly developing a ring built around Qualcomm silicon so more computation can run on the device itself rather than on a paired phone (TechCrunch, 3 September 2026).

How it makes money

Ultrahuman is, first and foremost, a hardware company that is trying to build a subscription business on top of the hardware.

The cost side tells the real turnaround story. Ultrahuman’s cost-to-earn ratio — how many rupees it spent to bring in one rupee of revenue — fell from Rs 3.37 in FY23, to Rs 1.36 in FY24, to Re 0.95 in FY25, alongside an EBITDA margin of 8.76% and return on capital employed of 12.9% in FY25 (Entrackr, January 2025; Entrackr, September 2025). The part most outside observers get wrong is treating Ultrahuman as a one-time hardware sale: roughly 20% of ring owners also buy a CGM sensor, and those customers reorder it four to five times a year, while the company’s own FY25 results release is explicitly framed around what it calls a “subscription engine” rather than ring unit sales (TechCrunch, 20 March 2024; company press release, cyborg.ultrahuman.com).

The numbers

Fiscal year (ended March) Revenue (Rs crore) Net profit / (loss) (Rs crore)
FY23 30 (71)
FY24 105 (revenue from operations) (38)
FY25 565 (revenue from operations) 73

Figures are as filed and reported by Entrackr from Ultrahuman’s financial statements (January 2025; September 2025). FY25 total income, including other income from interest and mutual-fund gains, was Rs 581 crore against total expenditure of Rs 535 crore — made up largely of Rs 142 crore in advertising, selling and distribution costs, Rs 95 crore in procurement, and Rs 52 crore in employee benefits (Entrackr, September 2025).

Where the money comes from

Two different snapshots of Ultrahuman’s geography show how much the Oura ruling reshaped the business inside a single year.

The surprise is not that the US matters most — it is how quickly a single regulatory ruling reshuffled a revenue mix that had barely changed in the company’s first four years, pushing India from an afterthought market toward a genuine second leg of the business.

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson in Ultrahuman’s numbers is not that hardware startups should chase profitability early, though the company’s falling cost-to-earn ratio suggests that discipline compounds quietly for years before it shows up as a headline profit. It is that the discipline has to arrive before the shock, not after it. Ultrahuman spent three fiscal years driving down what it cost to earn a rupee of revenue, from Rs 3.37 to under Re 1, well before an ITC ruling threatened to remove close to half its user base overnight. A company that had reached profitability by cutting corners rather than genuinely improving its unit economics would have had far less room to absorb a regulatory shock of that size. Durable margins, built early, are what let a company survive the setback it cannot control.

Frequently asked questions

What does Ultrahuman actually sell?

Its core products are the Ring AIR and Ring PRO smart rings for sleep, recovery and activity tracking, the M1 continuous glucose monitor, an at-home blood-testing service called Blood Vision, and paid software add-ons called PowerPlugs. Smart rings made up 91.3% of FY25 operating revenue (Entrackr, September 2025).

Who founded Ultrahuman, and when?

Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal founded Ultrahuman in 2019 in Bengaluru, after previously building and selling a logistics startup to Zomato. Kumar remains CEO (Wikipedia, accessed September 2026).

Is Ultrahuman profitable?

Yes, for the first time in FY25 (year ended March 2025), when it reported a net profit of Rs 73 crore on revenue of Rs 565 crore, after losses of Rs 38 crore in FY24 and Rs 71 crore in FY23 (Entrackr, September 2025; January 2025).

Why was the Ultrahuman Ring AIR banned from the US?

The US International Trade Commission ruled that Ultrahuman’s ring infringed a patent held by Oura covering the internal arrangement of ring components, and its exclusion order took effect on 21 October 2025, blocking new imports into the US. Ultrahuman has appealed and launched a redesigned Ring PRO aimed at working around the disputed patent (Businesswire, September 2025; Gadgets and Wearables, 22 October 2025; TechCrunch, 27 February 2026).

How much has Ultrahuman raised, and what is it worth?

The company has raised more than $130 million across a 2020 seed round and three subsequent rounds, and was valued at a reported $365 million after a $70 million round led by Qualcomm Ventures in September 2026, up from a roughly $120 million valuation in 2023 (Pulse2, 4 September 2026; TechCrunch, 3 September 2026).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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