Ultrahuman, the Bengaluru-based smart ring manufacturer, has entered into a two-year partnership with Abu Dhabi health authorities to create a biological-age model that will eventually become accessible to residents throughout the United Arab Emirates. The health tech startup announced Monday that it signed a memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center to develop and validate the model, which will merge clinical biomarkers with information gathered from wearable devices. The collaboration seeks to estimate how fast a person is aging and pinpoint factors like sleep, activity, cardiovascular health, and metabolism that might be speeding up or slowing down that process.

The UAE already ranks among Ultrahuman's 10 biggest markets and generates roughly 4% to 5% of the company's total revenue, according to CEO Mohit Kumar. The startup has operated in the market for close to five years and sees approximately 25% higher customer retention there compared with other regions. Ultrahuman has sold around 800,000 smart rings worldwide to date, with its typical users falling between 25 and 43 years old. Rolling out the model across the UAE would expose the company's algorithms to a significantly wider range of age groups than its current customer base provides. The biological-age model itself was built using Ultrahuman's existing data, combining users' chronological ages with wearable signals and, for some customers, blood-test markers to track how health indicators typically shift with age and spot departures from those patterns.

Kumar told TechCrunch that Ultrahuman sees itself as a health-data company rather than simply a hardware maker, with its smart ring serving as one method to gather information that can support algorithms covering aging, longevity, and other health domains. "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 said. "But truly, what we care about is not just the form factor, the ring, but what do we do with this data?" The partnership represents the startup's first move toward deploying a health algorithm at a national level, and Kumar emphasized the model is being designed to work with data from rings, wrist-worn devices, straps, and patches alongside clinical biomarkers. Residents will eventually access their health age through government digital-health platforms including TAMM and Sahatna, though the broader rollout will happen in phases without a specific timeline yet provided.

The deal marks Ultrahuman's latest push to move beyond selling wearable hardware and scale its health algorithms more broadly, with government collaboration offering access to a much larger population than the startup's own customer base. Working with a national health system lets the company apply its technology across different age groups and health profiles while spending the next two years on research and clinical validation of the model. Kumar stressed the model won't be trained on data from the UAE, saying "We will deploy an algorithm on the UAE data," and that Ultrahuman won't have access to personally identifiable information through the program. The effort unfolds alongside similar moves by competitors, with arch-rival Oura announcing a partnership with Abu Dhabi's Department of Health in May to combine wearable data with the emirate's longitudinal health data, initially targeting women's health and cardiometabolic risk. These parallel partnerships reflect how smart-ring makers are competing not just in hardware sales but in pushing deeper into preventive health at scale. For companies built around consumer wearables, national health collaborations offer a path to prove their algorithms work across diverse populations rather than just wellness-focused early adopters.