Ultrahuman partners with Abu Dhabi on biological-age model

Ultrahuman, a Bengaluru-based health tech startup best known for its smart rings, has signed a two-year memorandum of understanding with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center (ADPHC) to develop and validate a biological-age model, the company announced Monday. The model will combine clinical biomarkers with data from wearable devices to estimate how quickly an individual is aging and identify factors — including sleep, activity, cardiovascular health and metabolism — that may be accelerating or slowing that process.

The partnership marks Ultrahuman’s latest move beyond selling wearable hardware toward deploying its health algorithms at a larger scale. CEO Mohit Kumar told TechCrunch that working with a government gives Ultrahuman the chance to apply its algorithms to a far broader population than its roughly 800,000 customers who have bought its smart rings globally so far — the company’s first step toward a health algorithm at national scale, with the model eventually meant to be available to people across the UAE.

The model is being designed to be wearable-agnostic, so data from rings, wrist-worn devices, straps and patches can feed into it alongside clinical biomarkers. Individuals will eventually access their health age through government platforms including TAMM and Sahatna. Ultrahuman and ADPHC will spend the next two years on research and clinical validation, with the broader rollout happening in phases on a timeline Kumar did not provide.

The underlying model was built from Ultrahuman’s existing data, combining users’ chronological ages with wearable signals and, for some users, blood-test markers. Kumar stressed the model will not be trained on UAE data itself: “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. That distinction matters because Ultrahuman’s own customer base — typically between 25 and 43 years old — gives it a narrower view than the broader population a government health system would expose the model to.

The UAE is already among Ultrahuman’s 10 largest markets, accounting for about 4% to 5% of its overall revenue after nearly five years in the market, with about 25% higher retention than its other markets, Kumar said. Ultrahuman isn’t the only smart-ring maker courting Abu Dhabi on preventive health: rival Oura struck its own partnership with the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi in May, initially focused on women’s health and cardiometabolic risk. Kumar said he isn’t aware of another company working on the health-age model specifically, though he declined to comment on the scope of Oura’s work.

Why it matters

As governments look to deploy preventive-health algorithms at population scale, Ultrahuman’s UAE deal could become a template other wearable makers use to move beyond hardware sales — but the parallel, overlapping partnership with Oura shows Abu Dhabi is hedging across vendors rather than picking one.