Ultrahuman's Pivot to Smart Rings

This pivot shows that Ultrahuman moved from a feature that depended on someone else’s sensor into a product category where it could own the hardware, app, and daily habit. CGM add ons are useful, but Abbott and Dexcom control the sensor, the approvals, and now the consumer relationship through Lingo, Libre Rio, and Stelo. Smart rings are different. The ring itself becomes the main product, and glucose can sit on top as an optional layer.

• Ultrahuman’s original metabolic health pitch relied on pairing a third party CGM with its software. That became structurally weaker once Dexcom launched Stelo over the counter, Abbott pushed Lingo and Libre Rio into the consumer market, and Oura added Dexcom data directly into its own app.
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• The ring market also proved much larger and more durable than CGM for wellness users. Oura scaled from $225M of revenue in 2023 to $1B in 2025 and $764M in the first half of 2026, showing that sleep, recovery, cycle tracking, and passive health data support a mass market wearable business.
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• The lawsuit mattered because it targeted the exact category Ultrahuman had bet the company on. Oura filed a district court case in September 2023 and an ITC complaint in March 2024 covering smart ring patents, with Ultrahuman named as a respondent alongside other ring competitors.
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From here, the winners in wearables are likely to be the companies that control the always on device people wear every day, then plug in glucose, labs, and other health signals around it. That favors ring platforms with strong consumer distribution and software layers, which is why Ultrahuman’s rebound now depends on turning ring ownership into a broader health subscription business.