LIFTS Episode 103 - The Battle for Your Sleep: Smart Rings, Patents, and the Future of Health Tech

0:00Patterns are problems to be solved. People are obsessed with their sleep. People are thinking of sleep as a performance marker. What our competitors offer for a paid service, we actually offer for free. And the reason why we offer for free is not just because free is better, but we believe that choice is better.

0:24Matthew Januszek:Welcome to this week's episode of LIFS. I'm Matthew Januzek. I'm frustrated with my sleep score and I'm here with my co-host Mo Iqbal. Mo, how's your sleep score this week? Surprisingly, it's been pretty good. I woke up early this morning. I had a good workout. I took the train up. I'm in New York City in the Nomad District right now. So surprisingly, it's actually been pretty good. I think it must be the time of year, Thanksgiving, my birthday, my daughter's birthday. And as well behaved as I felt I've been, it just seems to be having a terrible impact on my trends. So I'm kind of really figuring out if there's any ways to hack the system, but I've not been able to achieve that yet.

1:11Well, I think you'll be incredibly excited for the guests that we have on this episode. I just want to set the stage a little bit. And And Matthew, you teased this out. Today's episode dives into one of the biggest storylines in health tech. We've seen the explosive growth of smart rings. And today we'll be talking about the rise of ultra human and one of the most consequential patent battles we've seen in wearables. This category has taken off. The global smart ring market was valued at almost$350 million in 2024 and is projected to surge past$1 billion by the end of the decade. That's more than a 21 % a year of growth.

1:51That's even faster than smartwatches, faster than fitness trackers, faster than almost any category in health wearables. But of course, with the growth, there's competition. There's going to be other issues with growth that comes up. But we're going to be talking about an incredible journey with UltraHuman. And before we have our guest chime in, I just want to set the stage here because our guest today has one of the most interesting founder stories I've heard in health tech. Mohit Kumar is the co-founder and CEO of UltraHuman, one of the most ambitious and fastest growing metabolic health and wearable companies in the world.

2:28But his path here wasn't typical. Before founding UltraHuman, Mohit co-founded a company called Runner, and I was reading about this last week, which is India's pioneering hyper-local delivery service, which then was later acquired by a company called Zomato and is now one of the largest food delivery companies globally. And after that exit, instead of just staying in that company, he did something unexpected. He went to Thailand. He trained in martial arts. And that's something, Matthew, both of you could chime on. And while he was there, he observed something powerful, that elite athletes were using biomarkers to guide every aspect of their performance.

3:11They were looking at things like HRV, glucose, sleep cycles, stress, recovery, and other points. So he asked himself a simple question. Why shouldn't everyone have access to this level of insight? That question ultimately became UltraHuman. Founded in 2019 along as co-founder Vassal Sinkhal, The company quickly built one of the world's most comprehensive metabolic health platforms. We'll talk more about this, but it includes a CGM, includes blood biomarkers, circadian insights, and the ultra-human ring, which I've actually worn for several months. And that product won Best of CES and also a Red Dot Design Award.

3:52Ultra-human emerged as one of the most compelling challengers to the market leader aura. until 2025 when it found itself at the center of a global patent war that resulted in its U.S. import ban. Today, I'm really excited to welcome Mohit to join us to talk about ambition, innovation, resilience, and what comes next as ultra-human develops a redesigned ring that charts its future in one of the fastest-growing areas in consumer health. Mohit, welcome to Lyfts. Hey, Mo. Great to hear from you and you, Matthew. Very glad to be here. Really excited to be on this podcast.

4:32Matthew Januszek:I was reading your impressive resume, Mohit. And certainly it's very inspiring for someone that's also been in business for a number of years. And one of the things I did, I went to a program called Business Mastery with Tony Robbins a few years ago. And they had these different areas of entrepreneurship, which was there was the creative business owner or business leader. There was the operations based business owner and leader. And then there was the true entrepreneur that would be out there sort of breaking new ground, finding new ideas. And over the years, I've always sort of played around with which part of it I'm, you know, which part I would class myself, whether I'd be the entrepreneur or whether I would be the sort of more of the creative type of person.

5:22Matthew Januszek:Definitely, I'm not the operational person. But when I was reading your resume and I was looking at your ultra human product, definitely I can see there's a lot of creativity in there, whether it's the design of the ring, whether it's some of the way that you've approached a few of the features. and then I also you know looking at what you've done um with with some of your previous uh business endeavors which is runner where certainly from a an operational perspective being able to pull something like that together in India a place which I've been and um you know I guess I appreciate some of the challenges that I'm sure you had to go through in creating that type of business I'd like to ask you the question you know where where do you see yourself in your business career at the moment?

6:07Matthew Januszek:Would you really class yourself as an entrepreneur? And is that the role that you play within your business? Are you the creative side of a lot of the products or are you really the operational execution side of the company? Well, that's an interesting question. I think of myself as an engineer because I grew up to be a software engineer. and then I started chasing things that are interesting from a computing perspective. So this journey in Thailand was actually a computing journey for me because I had a lot of, I used to start my day like very, very early, like 6 a.m. running up the mountain and then basically training throughout the day and then basically the afternoon was usually free because nobody would train around from 12 to 4.

6:57And then 6 onwards, you would just chill at the beach. I had a lot of free time in the middle and I thought like what should I really do in the in the middle hours and I had a lot of friends like in India to talk to back then and they're all working and in the middle hours nobody would actually like have enough time to like have a long conversation about life and what they're doing so I started coding back again I started basically working different kinds of computer science stuff around like what's happening in the world but what really felt interesting was what was really happening around me like right where i was training which was people were using the device the set of devices actually from there to measure their own body and then this seemed like a computer science problem because there's a lot of data it's completely unstructured there's a human in the middle usually a doctor or a sports scientist trying to interpret this can a machine solve this problem So I would say that I think I'm a good magnet for boring.

7:57Basically, things that seem boring, I try to make them interesting. Or the other way to say it is I get bored pretty quickly and I try to automate things for myself just to actually have fun with something that can be automated by computers. yeah that's where the common pattern is. Well you founded UltraHuman in 2019 with a platform vision that includes glucose monitoring biomarkers and metabolic insights but then came the ring air which really caught my attention and frankly I did not hear of UltraHuman until the launch of the ring air. I'm just curious obviously we love the ring format here at Lyfts but why a ring and And why was that the next frontier for you?

8:48Yeah, absolutely. So we started pretty much in 2019. The first product launch was in 2020, which was UltraHuman M1, which was a glucose tracking patch. Essentially, off-the-shelf CGM, but the software was different. The software would actually help you understand how different foods affect your metabolism and effectively your glucose metabolism. What we realized was that glucose metabolism has affected best food, which is very, very obvious, right? You consume sugary, starchy foods, they'll affect your sugar metabolism or glucose metabolism differently compared to if you eat balanced meals. And that was the kind of perspective that we were trying to create for people.

9:31A lot of people actually came back to us and said like, look, yes, foods do affect my glucose. but then my training, my recovery, my sleep, all these things also generally affect my glucose response and my recovery as well. So how do I actually get access to that piece of information? So we looked around, we looked for detailed sleep information from different kinds of trackers. What we found was that there are so many biomarkers hidden within sleep itself. There are so many layers to decode within sleep that just having limited control of being a software company might not really be helpful. So I started designing newer form factors for sleep tracking.

10:14Ring was interesting because many companies had attempted the Ring form factor and had seen higher retention of usage over time. I think there was a company called Motive, which I was a fan of back then, which did really well from a form factor perspective. Of course, Aura was around back then too, which is it's a late 2018 2019 probably a bulkier version of the ring and I saw that from a sleep perspective these are the two kind of early relevant companies and or was the emerging one motive was the original one back then felt that I think we could potentially build a better product in this market because we had experience in the metabolic health space generally from users interacting with the platform and the product and start like ground up designing what's called the ring air.

11:05I think essentially the goal was how do we make the ring lighter, much easier to wear super comfortable. Essentially the core attributes of a ring that allow you to wear it continuously and basically allow you to wear it during the sleep timeline. How do we over-index on that even further? We launched the first notchless ring in the market, which is essentially there's no, the notch is taken care of by the software and not the basically a notch on the hardware, essentially. We launched a fully rounded ring because we wanted it to feel extremely natural. And that was essentially ring gear for us in many ways, like extremely lightweight, natural looking, should feel like air.

11:54And that was somewhere around end of 2022, early 2023.

11:58Matthew Januszek:We had a previous podcast where we were talking about what we called, I think we titled the podcast Ring Wars. And Mo brought up the recent court case with you guys and Aura. And I've been in, I guess, developing products for 20, 25 years. And one of the things that we'd always do whenever we were looking at a new product is just get an understanding of the marketplace and the competitors and the IP out there. And obviously, you've built a huge company before. And one of the questions that was on my mind is how did you approach that? Because clearly, Aura had been in the market a long time, and I'm sure there was some influences there.

12:39Matthew Januszek:But I guess looking at the situation where you've gone into the ring with Aura and are currently fighting it out, what was your thought process when it came to entering this market? And were you aware that they were probably going to come after you? Or did you feel that you'd found some unique position in the market, similar to what you've explained, where you felt you had a clean lane to move past them in some way? When we entered the market, the problems that we were fighting were bulky form factors, poor software poorer sleep insights no correlation between sleep and metabolism data and other biomarkers those are the problems that we wanted to solve and basically fight against, not competitors basically because what we felt and believed and we still believe is that the world today sells close to 2 million to 3 million devices of rings every year I think from a risk from a factor perspective, you'll have 200 plus million of these devices being sold every year.

13:51So this is still a fundamentally super small sliver of maybe like an early category, right? So that being said, the health data from the ring is really exciting because it's sleep data for the first time ever in the last few decades or ever, I would say people are obsessed with their sleep. People are thinking of sleep as a performance marker, right? Which is, by the way, which used to be the other way around, deficit of sleep used to be a performance marker for people. So we were really inspired by that, that this as a conversation is really exciting. And those are the things that we were actually fighting.

14:29How do you fight factors that help you? How do you fight factors that actually are reducing your sleep lifespan, sleep related lifespan? How do you fight bad form factors? How do you fight poorer battery life? How do you fight poorer software, no correlation between other health markers? And we really had this integrated view of the human body because we believe that sleep is an interesting entry point, but then human body is interrelated, complex in many ways. So just by looking at the sleep data, it'll be irresponsible to tell people everything. And that's why we wanted to build this integrated platform on top of glucose.

15:06And then obviously, as you know, we do home water training, we do blood testing on top of these two markers as well. So we've really taken an integrated approach. But to answer your question, as a new market, you never expect to build to fight for patterns or basically some of those deterrents, but rather you've tried to solve for the user. And that's the spirit that we still live by.

15:33Matthew Januszek:Just a quick follow-up on that question. And for those people that are listening that really think that, you know, your Ring and Aura and many of the other products out there are all essentially sleep trackers, why don't you just give us a brief sort of high-level overview of the direction that you guys are following with Ultra Human in terms of like where you are today, in terms of how you differentiate yourselves and your vision for your organization, let's say in the next sort of three to five years? Absolutely. So UltraHuman is a quantified self platform. Essentially, we start with Ring as the gateway to all kinds of health insights because Ring is essentially the access to your sleep data.

16:20And we believe sleep is the foundation to health. And basis your sleep data, we're able to understand the impact of your sleep on metabolism, essentially your mood, your cycle, essentially if you're interested in that, and all those related health parameters. Now the way we are different compared to other players in the market today is that we focus on two specific aspects of a platform which are very unique. One is clinical grade aspects of the platform. So essentially, we are the first ring company in the world to introduce AFib detection on the ring itself by looking at your nighttime PPG data.

17:03And we have medical approval in many markets for that. And FDA should be coming soon for the US as well. You'll also see that we have a medical device company in the ovulation space. We acquired the company in the UK and then we use the algorithm as a medical device to detect ovulation. Very soon you'll see a similar effort on cardiovascular health, migraine and other things where you will see potentially software as medical device being integrated on top of the ring data. And this approach is very unique to ultra human that we can actually pick specific software as medical device products and basically build that on top of ring data.

17:45The other core aspect which is very, we believe is fundamental for the consumer is we offer consumer choice to pay subscription. Our users don't need to pay a mandatory subscription, unlike the existing product in the market. So you can choose to pay nothing and get sleep recovery movement insights regularly on a daily basis with no paywalls and no blockers. We believe those are table stakes in terms of like accessibility of your own data. And if you want specific areas of your health to deep dive on, like your cycle insights, which is coming from a medical device or AFib detection, which basically goes through a third party service, which we also pay for because we actually generate a medical grade third party service.

18:33All those are obviously services that we offer on top. but the base, the core of the platform is what our competitors offer for a paid service we actually offer for free. And the reason why we offer for free is not just because free is better, but we believe that choice is better. People should pay for only things that they want to deep dive in and not for just basic insights. Just for the sake of the audience, I've been following this category for almost 10 years, over 10 years now. And Malik, you said a couple of things that I don't want to make sure people miss. The first is around the form factor.

19:10So, Matthew, when Mahit talks about the ring form factor not having notches in it, it wasn't until the Aura Gen 4 where the inside is completely smooth. And that's really important for a couple of reasons. One, around just like all the comfort, which is what Mahit talked about, but it also feels very natural. So, one of the things that impressed me about the ring air is that the inside of it is actually perfectly smooth. There's no notches for the sensors. or to help the LEDs read a little bit better. And that just felt natural putting on. And you could see how sleek it is. So when I wore it, it just literally felt like my wedding ring, which I have on, is heavier than the ultra human ring, which is remarkable.

19:51The second point that he mentioned, which I thought is really, really relevant, and I didn't want that to go missed either, is a correlation with metabolic data. So when you think about some of the other companies in the market today, they typically started with a wearable first. And we talk about this a lot in the podcast, where you have consumer wearable going with basic consumer insights, then going up towards healthcare. But what happened with UltraHuman and what Mohit and his team did is they actually started in different categories. They started with metabolic health first. Even Apple and the Apple Watch, when Apple Watch came out with the first Apple Watch Zero, it wasn't a fitness tracker.

20:28It was just a smartwatch. They then layered in the fitness device in Apple Watch Series 2. So what that does, when he talks about the intersection and being able to bring both health metrics and biomarker data from PPG sensors, temperature sensors, and others into the metabolic arena, he's talking about combining these two layers that UltraHuman, as far as I know, did before any of the major players in the market today. So fast forward today and what happened. Since UltraHuman has done that, Aura then acquired a company called Dairy, which is another Finnish-based company. They also partnered with Dexcom, and Dexcom is a San Diego-based CGM company.

21:05They are the largest competitor to Abbott, who invested$75 million into Aura. That's how they have combined the incident. It wasn't until really 2025 that the Aura app now has the ability to combine insights from a CGM with the World of Ed. And even that, it's not fully integrated. The other thing that Mohit mentioned, which I don't want to get lost with the audience, is around blood testing. And that's something that UltraHuman has done before any of the other major players, as far as I know. This is something that was introduced by Aura and Whoop only in late Q3, early Q4 of 2025. So we're talking about a couple of months ago.

21:43The reason why that's important, and Mohit, I want to ask you a question later on AI, But as you're thinking about looking at patterns and being able to do behavioral nudges and broad recommendations, having that historical data has got to mean something to you. It's got to mean something to your data scientist as you're training out AI models. But I just wanted to call that out. Now, I want to move back, Matthew, to one thing you touched on, which is this U.S. ITC ruling. But given what I just said, and given the fact that now most of the audience can understand that ultra-human wasn't just trying to replicate or copy a leader, they were actually being innovative and kind of creating their own journey.

22:23However, to Matthew's point, there are still patents, there are still designs and IP that you've got to follow. and in a very specific ruling and frankly surprising a lot of us in the industry the ITC ruled that ultra human air infringed on the U.S. patent and specifically that U.S. patent we'll put a link to it is U.S. patent 11 ,868178 and that essentially covers the ring internal architecture. The ruling was upheld in September through a pretty aggressive back and forth on both sides. And by October 21st, 2025, which is just a few weeks ago, import and sales of the ring air in the US were banned.

23:07And that is just massive, right? It's just remarkable for anyone to see something like that. And again, really surprised most people, can't really all people in the industry, as far as I know. So Mahir, I just want, you know, just take us to that moment. How did you process it? Just as an entrepreneur, we're all entrepreneurs here. How did you kind of process that news? Were you prepared for it? And what actions are you taking next? As an entrepreneur, as like ultra human, the company, obviously, this was really hard to us because U.S. was a really large market for us. And it still continues to be a very large market.

23:46Almost 50 % of our user base is actually in the U.S. today, active user base. and we just one clarification would be that today while we can't sell the ring directly through ultrahuman.com some of our partners who have existing stock are still continuing to sell so that obviously provides us some bridge for the next few months because obviously they might have inventory to sell over the next few months but But basically, think of existing retailers, almost all of them actually have the ultra-human ring that is selling across this holiday season, selling across their stores. So we're still planning to see potentially like, but I mean, throughout the holiday season or in the Q1, Q2 next year, potentially some kind of growth.

24:43and that would be one micro relief to us because obviously people continue to buy the product, people continue to believe in us. We still receive amazing model love letters from our users that like, look, we believe in you guys and believe in the thesis of the platform. We believe in the non-subscription, believe in the lightness of the form factor. So we want you guys to come back as quickly as possible. People have offered to write letters to the US president. and people have offered to basically protest against this order. People have offered to basically write long, you can say, complaints against this kind of behavior in the market.

25:23That's the, as an entrepreneur, that's how we took it. Like we just took it on the chin and we said like, look, we have to solve the problem. As an engineer, we took it very, very differently. We said like, look, patterns are problems to be solved because there are two kinds of patterns. One kind of patent is you are an innovator in a category and you really basically innovate something new and then you deserve the right to get royalty for it, obviously, right? The second one is you go to the market, you buy a patent and you sue everyone for it. and one just feels more unfair than the other, generally speaking, because if the second one persisted throughout every category, then no one would be able to build anything.

26:09Like companies with a lot of money would just be able to build whatever they want, but wouldn't allow a new company to actually build anything in the space. If you could unpack that, specifically what company did Aura buy and what patent are you referencing? I think we've blogged about this earlier. I think we're talking about the 178 patent about a company called Motive. This 178 patent is not the original Aura patent, which they've sued us for and they've gotten the ITC order for. This is a Motive patent, essentially the company that they acquired. I think Motive was acquired by a company called Proxy, which is a payments company and Aura acquired the payments company to obviously get these patents.

26:51So that's the trail here. But that being aside, I was talking about the second way, how we took it. We took it like an engineer. We said, look, it's an engineering challenge. So let's actually solve the problem like an engineer. Let's design a different kind of a ring, which basically we can get customs approval for to sell in the US. And that should be coming out pretty soon, too. So as an entrepreneur, obviously, we are taking it. like obviously we took it and we felt that look this is this feels a little unfair but we are here for the long term we're not here for just this one incident because it's such a small category and we we have longevity as a company we have been profitable for the last two and a half years we believe in actually taking a slightly longer view in this category and not just thinking about the next sales season so so as a company we are I mean we are very well equipped to actually survive this for the next 5, 10, 15 years.

27:49We don't really care to a large extent. But as an engineer, obviously, this was challenging because this was a short window. And what we did was in a short window, we redesigned the product completely, even though we continue to contest and fight back on the patent war, where we say that this product is not infringing. And at the same time, we designed a completely new product and we are getting customs approval for it as well, which should actually unblock the US sale pretty soon.