The smart ring category has spent several years trying to find its killer feature. For most of that time, the conversation has been dominated by health metrics: sleep staging, heart rate variability, blood oxygen. But Ultrahuman, the Bengaluru-based wearable startup that holds the second-largest share of the global market, is now betting the next frontier is simpler and more fundamental than any sensor reading. It is, quite simply, battery life.
The company's newly announced Ring Pro, its third-generation device, offers up to 15 days of battery life, compared with four to six days on the Ring Air, and is priced at $479. That gap is considerable. The titanium Ring Pro is slated to last 15 days on a single charge, nearly double the seven to eight days of battery life recorded in independent testing of the top-rated Oura Ring 4. For consumers who have quietly let their smart ring turn into an expensive piece of jewellery after forgetting to charge it one too many times, this is a directly practical argument for upgrading.
When paired with the new wireless Pro Charging Case, which comes included in the purchase price, the device's staying power extends to 45 days. The ring also features enhanced storage, with enough memory to retain up to 250 days of health data on the device itself. Hardware ambition is clearly not in short supply here. The Ring Pro also features a redesigned heart-rate sensing architecture for improved signal quality during sleep and a new dual-core processor to enhance data accuracy and on-device computing.
There is a significant catch, however, and it has nothing to do with the hardware. Ultrahuman's US business was disrupted in October 2025 after the US International Trade Commission ruled in Oura's favour in a patent dispute, preventing the startup from importing new ring inventory into the country. The US accounted for about 45 per cent of Ultrahuman's roughly 700,000 daily active users worldwide, according to co-founder and CEO Mohit Kumar. That is an enormous share of a company's most engaged audience to lose access to, and the Ring Pro launch, despite its impressive specifications, is being conducted with that wound still open.
The strategic calculus here involves several competing considerations. To work around Oura's patent, Ultrahuman developed the Ring Pro with a new design, and the device has been submitted to US Customs and Border Protection for clearance to confirm it can legally be imported into the country. Unlike rival RingConn, which secured a licensing deal with Oura to stay on US shelves, Ultrahuman remains in a legal deadlock after being found to have infringed on Oura's form-factor patents. Whether the redesigned Ring Pro is sufficiently differentiated to clear customs remains an open question with very real commercial consequences.
For Australian consumers, the dispute is largely irrelevant to the purchasing decision. Ultrahuman's key growth markets include the UK, Canada, Australia, and India, with the latter contributing about 8 to 9 per cent of overall revenue after recent investments in local customer support. The Ring Pro is available for preorder now, with shipments beginning in March. The device also includes ProRelease technology, which enables the Ring Pro to be cut apart more easily in the event of swelling or injury to the finger, a safety feature that addresses a genuine concern for anyone wearing a rigid band continuously.
Alongside the hardware, Ultrahuman unveiled Jade, a system it describes as a real-time biointelligence AI. In practical terms, Jade can prompt breathwork sessions if it detects rising stress, trigger AFib detection, and interpret trends across the entire Ultrahuman ecosystem, including continuous glucose monitor data and Blood Vision biomarkers. Kumar said Jade is designed to move beyond retrospective health summaries toward real-time, actionable guidance. The ambition is notable: rather than simply presenting data for users to interpret, the system is built to respond autonomously. Jade and the PowerPlugs feature platform are available to all Ultrahuman users, including those in the US.
The broader market context rewards some attention here. Global smart ring shipments grew nearly 80 per cent year-on-year in 2025, driven by demand for compact wearables with advanced sleep tracking and longer battery life, according to senior analyst Anshika Jain at Counterpoint Research. Oura continues to lead with more than two-thirds of the market, while Ultrahuman holds the second position. That gap is substantial, and missing out on such a crucial market as the US will no doubt hold Ultrahuman back from seriously challenging Oura's dominance.
Supporters of Ultrahuman's approach point to the Ring Pro's subscription-free model as a genuine point of differentiation. Where Oura starts at $349 and requires a $5.99 monthly subscription, Ultrahuman's more premium price point comes without an ongoing fee for core features. For health-conscious consumers who bristle at recurring software charges layered onto expensive hardware, this matters. The counterargument is that Oura's application is widely regarded as the most refined in the category, and ecosystem polish counts for more than hardware specifications for many users once the novelty of a new gadget fades.
There is also a reasonable question about the pace at which AI-driven health features are outrunning the evidence base. Smart rings remain consumer devices, not medical instruments, and the gap between what a ring detects and what a doctor can act upon remains wide. Counterpoint Research's Jain has noted that future leaders in the category will be defined by sensor accuracy, AI-driven insights, and seamless ecosystem integration, but none of those criteria are settled science. Consumers would do well to treat biometric scores as useful signals rather than clinical diagnoses.
What seems clear is that Ultrahuman's Ring Pro represents a genuine engineering step forward in a category that has sometimes struggled to articulate why each new generation justifies the price of entry. Despite the US disruption, Ultrahuman is currently operating at an annualised revenue run rate of about $150 million; it reported $64 million in operating revenue in the financial year ended March 2025, though margins are expected to narrow due to litigation costs, tariffs, and the redesign effort. The company is profitable and still growing, but the legal cloud over its largest market is a variable that no amount of battery life improvement can fully resolve. The Ring Pro is a compelling product for Australians who have been sitting on the sideline waiting for a smarter wearable alternative; whether it is the device that reshapes the market globally is a question that may ultimately be answered by lawyers as much as by engineers.