Ultrahuman raises $17.5m for wearable glucose tracker

The Series B funding for Ultrahuman's wearable glucose tracker came from alpha wave incubation (AWI), which is backed by DisruptAD and managed by Falcon Edge, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Utsav Somani’s iSeed fund. Marquee founders and angel investors also participated including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer, Sandeep Singhal, Kunal Shah, Sujeet Kumar, Deepinder Goyal, Gunjan Patidar, Gaurav Munjal, Revant Bhate, Mohit Gupta, Vikram Dhingra and Roman Saini.

The Ultrahuman Cyborg wearable helps people optimise their exercise and nutrition based on glucose biomarkers. The Ultrahuman wearable launched in June 2021 has already amassed thousands of users in the waitlist with users raving about their experience on Twitter after using the wearable.

The metabolic health crisis is unarguably one of the largest healthcare crises that exists today. Over one billion people in the world suffer from a metabolic health disorder which contributes to almost 85% of all chronic diseases in the world.

By helping people understand how food and exercise affects their metabolic health, people would be able to make informed choices about what they eat and their activity levels. The approach is a geography / diet agnostic way to help people eat and exercise better.

A single biomarker like glucose can reveal so much about how a particular food item affects the user’s metabolic health by measuring the glucose response. This response is unique to an individual and it depends on various factors like their microbiome diversity, stress levels, time of the day, and food ingredient quality.

Ultrahuman was started by Mohit Kumar and Vatsal Singhal who were also co-founders at Runnr that later merged with Zomato. Mohit is an avid cyclist, biohacker and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu enthusiast. Vatsal is a cross fit enthusiast and biohacker. Mohit was training at one of the largest MMA Camps in the world (Tiger Muay Thai). There he observed athletes train smartly via usage of data, recovery tools and protocols. He got together with Vatsal and they came up with a vision for Ultrahuman where they can make the journey of fitness for people more personalised and impactful.

“Biomarkers will change how the fitness and the healthcare industry works. By being able to continuously monitor their biomarkers like glucose, users can not only avoid chronic diseases but make lifestyle changes that help them improve their fitness levels for longevity and performance” said Ultrahuman Founder and CEO Mohit Kumar.

Navroz D. Udwadia, Co-Founder of Falcon Edge Capital, said: "We are excited to partner with Mohit and Vatsal, founders of Ultrahuman. We believe they can transform the way people view personal wellness globally. Their thoughtfulness around UI / design and consumer experience is inspiring. We are thrilled to back what could be a pioneering biomarker-driven global healthcare business. Their dual obsessiveness around product engineering and customer experience is already showing result in terms of product market fit and retention.”

When commenting on the investment, Ravi Mehta, Founder and MD Steadview Capital, said: “We are excited to be a part of Ultrahuman’s journey as it takes what we believe to be a disruptive approach to personal wellness. Ultrahuman’s biosensor-enabled, data-first model, in our view, is the future of any personalised healthcare ecosystem.”

“We at Nexus are super excited about Ultrahuman’s biomarker based approach to build hyper- personalised diet and exercise journeys for users. We are seeing a very strong pull for Ultrahuman’s Cyborg platform globally and feel that it will be a foundational approach to personal wellness in the years to come” added Sameer Brij Verma, MD Nexus Venture Partners.

“Mohit and the team have taken their personal fitness journeys and translated them to a world class product and experience in just over a year. We expect Ultrahuman to help shape how health is proactively monitored across global audiences" said Karthik Reddy, Founder of Blume Ventures.