Ultrahuman Signs Two-Year Deal With Abu Dhabi to Build National Biological-Age Model

Ultrahuman has signed a two-year memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center (ADPHC) to develop and validate a biological-age model that it intends to make available to people across the United Arab Emirates.

The Bengaluru-based startup, best known for its smart rings, announced the deal on Monday. The model will combine clinical biomarkers with data from wearable devices to estimate how quickly an individual is aging. It aims to identify factors — 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. CEO Mohit Kumar said the company increasingly sees itself as a health-data company, with the smart ring serving as one way to collect information underpinning algorithms spanning aging, longevity, and other areas of health.

"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?"

What does the deal change for Ultrahuman?

Working with a government gives Ultrahuman the chance to apply its algorithms to a far broader population than its own customer base. The startup has sold around 800,000 smart rings globally so far. The Abu Dhabi partnership is its first step toward deploying a health algorithm at national scale.

The 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 on research and clinical validation. Kumar said the broader rollout will happen in phases but did not provide a timeline.

How important is the UAE market?

The UAE already ranks among Ultrahuman's 10 largest markets and accounts for about 4% to 5% of overall revenue, Kumar said. The startup has operated there for nearly five years and sees about 25% higher retention than in its other markets.

The existing customer base gives Ultrahuman a narrow view of the population: its typical users are between 25 and 43 years old. 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. That lets the startup track how health markers typically change with age and identify deviations.

Whose data will train the model?

Kumar stressed the model will not be trained on UAE data. "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's arch-rival Oura to combine the Finnish company's wearable data with the emirate's longitudinal health data, initially focusing on women's health and cardiometabolic risk.

Kumar said Ultrahuman is not aware of another company working with Abu Dhabi authorities on the health age model specifically. He acknowledged the government works with multiple health-tech companies but 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 pushing their businesses beyond hardware and deeper into preventive health. Ultrahuman is also looking to build a smart ring that can run software on the device — powering everything from AI interactions to games.