Dubai based Mohit Kumar founded Ultrahuman at the end of 2019, after success scaling a fast food delivery service in India. In those six years the health technology company has grown rapidly and become a trusted premium brand and a real rival to Oura. In this interview we chat to Mohit about making it happen…
The Ring Pro is the latest ring from Ultrahuman, with battery life lasting up to 15 days.
When we talked to our Ring Air community we found that, once people put the ring on, they actually just keep it on as a passive health device. Because there’s no screen or interruptions, it just works in the background and people enjoy this passiveness – but they do have to charge the device every four days or so. With the Ring Pro we wanted to help people track their health uninterrupted, so our incredible engineers worked to offer the longest battery life in the category.
You may well see something surprising from Ultrahuman soon.
We don’t shy away from making new devices or using new form factors; but at the same time, when we think of a new design or form factor, we try to do something new. Watches already exist, bands already exist, so why would we create another one unless there’s going to be a difference? Our next form factor will come with a bit of a surprise in the form of a new sensor – something nobody has done before.
Ultrahuman Blood Vision is in the UK now.
Blood Vision is a blood-testing service, but it’s built for longevity rather than disease diagnostics. What I mean by longevity is that your blood markers, close to a hundred of them, tell a unique story about your health. When you combine that with markers from the Ultrahuman ring, you can understand how lifestyle affects your underlying health. For example, an increase or decrease in activity, or the consistency of your sleep, can affect your metabolism. We are probably the only company in the world right now that measures continuous biometric data from the ring and also blood marker data. Then we try to match the two together, to tell you what you need to do to optimise your health.
I have a very global outlook.
I grew up in Bengaluru, India, and also had some schooling in Kathmandu, Nepal. These days because of American expansion I travel a lot. In the last few months we have pushed a lot of expansion in south-east Asia too, particularly in China and Vietnam, so that has been the other side of my most recent travels.
Travel over the last year has been pretty intensive!
I spend 50 to 60% of my time travelling and I find it exciting. Three years ago, we didn’t realise just how many people would want to use our product – it was a niche category –but now every healthcare provider, every hospital, every doctor is excited about our products and wants to use the data.
I scaled a fast food business before starting Ultrahuman.
Before Ultrahuman, I started a food delivery company based out of India, a bit like DoorDash and Deliveroo. We started in 2014 and then did a merger with a company called Zomato in India. I scaled the business from a few thousand transactions a day to between two and three million transactions a day – outside of China, it was the largest business like that in the world.
Health science is no longer just for an elite group.
My interest in health stems from my love of cycling. I’ve always felt that optimum health is the ultimate performance goal for people because it’s the end to whatever means people have, to lead a good life. This could be as an athlete or an individual just trying to feel better, be in pain less and get a good night’s sleep.
The data that tells you if someone is healthy is similar for an athlete and a non-athlete.
The goals might change but the markers are similar. So, generally athletes and biohackers are ahead of the game because they experiment a lot more with their bodies – but those experiments are being used for everyone else too, telling us what works for the whole population. This is interesting to me as, in some ways, it makes health a lot more accessible to people.
Biointelligence will get to a point where it tells us what to eat.
Ultrahuman’s AI platform is called Jade. We built it as a biointelligence, rather than AI, because in addition to an LLM – which simply looks at patterns in your data – Jade also generates actions and does stuff on your behalf. It can connect the dots across our ecosystem of Ring, CGM and Blood Vision, and even the 2500+ tests accessible in our new performance lab in Bengaluru. Eventually, it should be able to look at your data and tell you what you should be eating and even order for you – that’s the level we think it could go to.
I love my work.
I have a lot of fun, especially at work. I don’t see much difference between work and my personal life, broadly speaking. Because work is so exciting, I don’t differentiate between the two much in my case. I do enjoy reading, though – books about martial arts, about cycling and history.
For more info see ultrahuman.com
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