Smart ring maker Ultrahuman to roll out biological-age model across UAE

Ultrahuman, a Bengaluru-based health tech startup best known for its smart rings, has partnered with Abu Dhabi health authorities to develop a biological-age model that it says will eventually be made available to people across the United Arab Emirates.

On Monday, Ultrahuman announced that it had signed a two-year memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center (ADPHC) to develop and validate the model, which will combine clinical biomarkers with data from wearable devices. The partnership aims to use these signals to estimate how quickly an individual is aging and identify factors — including sleep, activity, cardiovascular health, and metabolism — that may be accelerating or slowing that process.

The partnership marks Ultrahuman’s latest effort to go beyond selling wearable hardware and deploy its health algorithms at a much larger scale. The startup increasingly sees itself as a health-data company, with its smart ring serving as one way to collect information that can underpin algorithms spanning aging, longevity, and other areas of health, CEO Mohit Kumar said in an interview.

“If you look at Ultrahuman as a company, we obviously have the Ultrahuman Ring, which is a way to acquire data from the human body,” Kumar told TechCrunch. “But truly, what we care about is not just the form factor, the ring, but what do we do with this data?”

Working with a government gives Ultrahuman the opportunity to apply its algorithms to a far broader population than its own customer base, Kumar said. The startup has sold around 800,000 smart rings globally so far. The Abu Dhabi partnership is Ultrahuman’s first step toward deploying a health algorithm at a national scale, with the health age model eventually intended to be available to people across the UAE, according to the company.

Even though Ultrahuman is known for its smart rings, Kumar said the biological-age model is being designed to be wearable-agnostic, allowing data from rings, wrist-worn devices, straps, and patches to feed into the system alongside clinical biomarkers. Individuals will eventually be able to access their health age through government digital-health platforms including TAMM and Sahatna, the startup said.

Ultrahuman and ADPHC will spend the next two years working on research and clinical validation of the model. Kumar told TechCrunch that the broader rollout will happen in phases, but did not provide a timeline.

The UAE is already among Ultrahuman’s 10 largest markets and accounts for about 4% to 5% of its overall revenue, Kumar said. The startup has operated in the market for nearly five years and sees about 25% higher retention there compared with its other markets, he noted.

Ultrahuman’s existing customer base gives it a narrower view of the population than a government health system. Its typical users are between 25 and 43 years old, Kumar said, while deploying the model across the UAE would expose it to a much broader range of age groups.

The underlying biological-age model was developed using Ultrahuman’s existing data, combining users’ chronological ages with wearable signals and, for some users, blood-test markers, Kumar told TechCrunch. That allows the startup to track how health markers typically change with age and identify deviations from those patterns.

Kumar stressed the model will not be trained on data from the UAE. “We will deploy an algorithm on the UAE data,” he said, adding that Ultrahuman will not have access to personally identifiable information through the program.

Ultrahuman is not the only smart-ring maker working with Abu Dhabi on preventive health. In May, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi announced a partnership with Ultrahuman arch-rival Oura to combine the company’s wearable data with the emirate’s longitudinal health data, initially focusing on women’s health and cardiometabolic risk.

Kumar told TechCrunch that Ultrahuman is not aware of another company working with Abu Dhabi authorities on the health age model specifically. While he acknowledged that the government works with multiple health-tech companies, he declined to comment on the scope of Oura’s work with Abu Dhabi.

The parallel partnerships come as Ultrahuman and Oura compete in the smart-ring market while looking to push their businesses beyond wearable hardware and deeper into preventive health. The work with the Abu Dhabi authorities also comes as Ultrahuman is looking to build a smart ring that can run software on the device and even power everything from AI interactions to games.