Ultrahuman on Friday unveiled a new smart ring with longer battery life and a redesigned form factor, as the Bengaluru-based wearable maker seeks to revive its U.S. business that was disrupted last year by a patent dispute with rival Oura.

The Ring Pro, Ultrahuman’s third-generation smart ring, offers up to 15 days of battery life — compared with four to six days on the Ring Air — and is priced at $479. It will be available for preorders globally, excluding the U.S., with shipments beginning in March.

Ultrahuman’s U.S. business was disrupted in October 2025 after the U.S. International Trade Commission — a federal agency that handles trade disputes — ruled in Oura’s favor in a patent dispute. The ruling prevented the startup from importing new ring inventory into the country, although existing retail stock continued to be sold. The blow was significant. The U.S. accounted for about 45% of Ultrahuman’s roughly 700,000 daily active users worldwide, according to co-founder and CEO Mohit Kumar.

In August 2025, Ultrahuman also filed a separate patent infringement case against Oura in the Delhi High Court, where the matter remains pending.

Meanwhile, to work around Oura’s patent, Ultrahuman developed the Ring Pro with a new design, Kumar told TechCrunch, adding that the device has been submitted to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection for clearance to confirm it can legally be imported into the country.

Despite the U.S. disruption, Ultrahuman is currently operating at an annualized revenue run rate of about $150 million, Kumar said. It reported $64 million in operating revenue in the financial year ended March 2025. The startup remains profitable after tax, although margins are expected to narrow due to litigation costs, tariffs, and the redesign effort, he added.

Alongside the new ring, Ultrahuman introduced Jade, a real-time “biointelligence” system that analyzes user health data across its devices and services to generate personalized insights and recommendations.

Kumar said Jade is designed to move beyond retrospective health summaries toward real-time, actionable guidance.

“Most AI tools today look backward at your data,” he said. “Jade is built to react to your health in real time and surface actions users can take.”

Kumar said Jade will be available to all Ultrahuman users, including those using the older Ring Air, and does not currently require a subscription.

The Ring Pro 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. The device can store up to 250 days of health data and weighs about 5% to 6% more than the Ring Air, launched in July 2023 at $349.

Ultrahuman has also introduced a Pro Charger with up to 45 days of battery life to support on-the-go charging and enable faster updates and diagnostics through direct case connectivity. The charger also supports wireless charging via Qi, the same standard used by most modern smartphones.

Women account for about 68% of Ultrahuman’s user base, up from roughly 65% a year earlier, Kumar said, reflecting strong adoption of the startup’s women’s health features.

Ultrahuman also offers subscription-based services across its broader health platform, including a coaching and recovery program called PowerPlugs, the Blood Vision metabolic panel, Ultrahuman Home, and a continuous glucose monitoring offering. Subscriptions contribute about 16% of Ultrahuman’s revenue, while Blood Vision accounts for roughly 5% to 6% of the business, Kumar said.

Ultrahuman’s key growth markets include the U.K., Canada, Australia, and India, Kumar told TechCrunch, with the latter contributing about 8% to 9% of overall revenue after recent investments in local customer support.

Global smart ring shipments grew nearly 80% year-over-year in 2025, driven by demand for compact wearables with advanced sleep tracking and longer battery life, said Anshika Jain, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research. Oura continues to lead with more than two-thirds of the market, while Ultrahuman holds the second position.

Jain added that future leaders in the category will be defined by sensor accuracy, AI-driven insights, and seamless ecosystem integration.

Separate IDC data showed global smart ring shipments rising about 30% year over year in Q3 2025 to nearly 1 million units, driven in part by demand for screenless fitness trackers, said Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC India. Ultrahuman captured roughly 25% of the market during the period, per IDC.

Founded in 2019, Ultrahuman has raised about $55 million to date and counts Alpha Wave Incubation, Blume Ventures, Steadview Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners among its investors.

Ultrahuman, Kumar said, is building additional production capacity to support demand for the Ring Pro over the coming months.

Starting this week, Perplexity subscribers will have a new agentic tool at their disposal.

Perplexity Computer, in the company’s words, “unifies every current AI capability into a single system.” More specifically, Perplexity says it is a computer user agent that can execute complex workflows independently using 19 different AI models, even creating subagents to handle specific problems.

The tool is available now, only on the company’s highest subscription tier, the $200/month Perplexity Max. It runs entirely in the cloud, which might spare it some of the security concerns of other agentic tools like OpenClaw.

TechCrunch hasn’t done a hands-on demo of the new tool, but in example workflows on Perplexity’s website, it is shown handling tasks that involve collecting statistics, financial, or legal data; creating analysis; and sharing its findings as finished websites or visualizations. 

Perplexity invited the press to a background briefing with executives last week to discuss the product and lay out the agenda for the year. The event was intended to include a demonstration of the tool, but the company canceled the demo because of flaws found in the product hours before the event.

This tool represents the evolution of Perplexity, which made a splash early in the AI boom by wrapping frontier models in familiar user interfaces, particularly its search-engine-like answer service. It then moved on to launch its Comet web browser last summer. Competitors like Google have now changed their products to be more like those built at Perplexity, one executive said, but that’s a threat as much as a compliment.

The company is changing in response to a shifting ecosystem: One of the first AI companies to offer advertising, it abandoned that business late last year, saying last week that it undermined users’ trust in their answers’ accuracy. But Perplexity’s total user base — in the tens of millions of users — pales in comparison to that of OpenAI, which claims 800 million weekly users and began testing ads in ChatGPT this year.

Now, Perplexity executives say they are aiming for a more boutique set of users, with products that serve people making “GDP-moving decisions.” Executives in the briefing, who asked not to be identified by name, described prioritizing enterprise subscriptions, particularly for deep research.

“You don’t hear us talk about MAUs ever, because we’re not actually on a mission to get as many users as possible,” one executive said.

Perplexity recently released a new benchmark for complex research tasks, called Draco, where (no surprise) its own deep research offering beats out competitors like Gemini. 

Perplexity says it is no longer reliant on other companies’ APIs for its web index and now has its own AI-optimized search API. But the company is doubling down on packaging frontier models in a consumer-friendly user experience, arguing that there is value in orchestrating multiple third-party LLMs to obtain the most cost-effective and accurate answers to queries.

“Multi-model is the future,” one Perplexity exec argued. Models, in their view, are specializing, not commoditizing. The company has found that its users frequently switch between models to obtain the results they are looking for, with December 2025 queries for visual outputs most often sent to Gemini Flash, software engineering done in Claude Sonnet 4.5, and medical research in GPT-5.1.

If one LLM is better at coding tasks and another does a better job drafting marketing copy, Perplexity’s software can automatically choose the ideal one. Another example, executives said, is running Perplexity’s own modified open source Chinese-built LLMs to answer queries more cheaply, a technique the company got dinged for hiding from its customers last year. But done transparently, the technique could prove an efficient way to optimize LLM queries.

The company also offers users the opportunity to query multiple models at once, in a feature called Model Council. But the unit economics of offering multiple queries at flat subscription rates aren’t entirely clear. 

Still, without expensive infrastructure projects on its books and with, the executives claimed, high margins on user fees, Perplexity believes it will remain competitive by allocating tokens to the best model for a purpose.

And there is more on the horizon: Perplexity Comet browser is coming to iOS next month, and the company is planning a developers conference, Ask, on March 11 in San Francisco to promote third-party use of its API.

One executive said that instead of looking at the previous day’s number of queries each morning, he was now looking at the most recent revenue metrics. At least some customers are noticing a new focus on the bottom line, with the Perplexity subreddit featuring frequent complaints of new rate limits on free and subscription product tiers.

However, the execs at the briefing dismiss such complaints: “Any discussions on the free tier being made worse or rate-limited is completely false,” one said.

Apple and Netflix have entered a partnership to co-broadcast the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix, announced Thursday by Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue. For the first time, F1 fans in the U.S. will be able to watch the live race simultaneously on both Apple TV and Netflix. 

Netflix subscribers will be able to stream the full race weekend — including practice, qualifying, and the Grand Prix itself on May 24 — live on the platform.

​Beyond live race coverage, the partnership includes cross-promotion of Netflix’s hit series, “Drive to Survive.” For the first time, the eighth season — which consists of eight episodes covering the 2025 Formula One World Championship — will be available to both Apple TV subscribers in the U.S. and Netflix users globally, significantly broadening its audience. 

Season 8 premieres today, on February 27. 

F1’s rise in American culture extends beyond television at this point — Brad Pitt’s “F1” is nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards. “Drive to Survive” has successfully attracted a diverse audience for its behind-the-scenes approach, transforming it from a typical sports docuseries into a compelling narrative that’s brought in millions of new fans.

The series has been a particular focus of Apple’s broader F1 ambitions: The company has said it plans to promote the sport across Apple News, Apple Maps (highlighting F1 tracks around the world), Apple Music, and Apple Fitness+, as well as in its physical retail stores.

This collaboration also means Netflix continues to push into live sports broadcasting, after pivoting from a “no-sports” stance to securing major rights for NFL Christmas games, WWE Raw, and MLB. 

Additionally, the joint effort comes as part of Apple’s new multi-year deal with Formula 1, under which Apple TV replaced ESPN as the exclusive U.S. broadcaster for all 24 races beginning this season. The deal is reportedly valued at around $150 million per season, a significant jump from the roughly $85 million ESPN reportedly paid. All races are available to Apple TV subscribers at no extra charge. The previous partnership with ESPN achieved an average viewership of 1.3 million in its final year.

Notably, Netflix was previously reported to be eyeing U.S. media rights for Formula 1 back in 2022.