Metabolic fitness platform Ultrahuman has acquired fellow Indian company LazyCo, famed for creating the Aina ring wearable. 

LazyCo will be integrated with Ultrahuman’s in-house hardware development team as they seek opportunities to enhance the user experience and help improve global metabolic health standards. Ultrahuman plans to leverage LazyCo’s expertise to generate deeper metabolic insights and better overall health insights for consumers.

The metabolic health crisis is one of the largest. Over a billion people in the world suffer from a metabolic health disorder that contributes to almost 85% of all chronic diseases in the world. By helping people understand how food and exercise affect their metabolic health, people can make informed choices about what they eat and their activity levels. The approach is a geography and diet agnostic way to help people eat and exercise better. 

Measuring a biomarker such as glucose can reveal much about how a particular food item affects the user’s metabolic health. This is unique to an individual and it depends on factors such as their gut microbiome diversity, stress levels, time of the day and food ingredient quality. With this acquisition, the idea would be to expand the set of real-time biomarkers that could provide health insights.

LazyCo was founded in 2017 by Apoorv Shankar and Yogansh Namdeo, engineers turned product designers. The company focused on building hardware products that made daily life easier. One of the notable products was the Aina AI-powered smart ring designed to predict and automate daily tasks without the need to take the phone out of the pocket. Digital tasks such as booking cabs, controlling smart home devices, activating SOS alerts, and taking phone calls were faster and easier through the ring. LazyCo completed a Kickstarter campaign in 2019 and won several design and start-up awards from the likes of Alibaba and Qualcomm.

“Ultrahuman’s vision of making health more personalised and impactful for people syncs with LazyCo’s vision of building products that solve problems for people in the most effortless ways,” said Shankar, CEO of LazyCo. “Together, we can create a deeper impact on the overall health of the world.”

Ultrahuman launched with its M1 wearable, a metabolic health tracking platform that provides intelligent nudges based on glucose biomarkers. This helps people optimise their exercise, sleep and nutrition based on deep insights from the platform. The M1 tracks the wearer’s metabolism as they go about their day. It triggers timely nudges to the user such as alerts to a high blood glucose event and suggestions to take a walk for optimising their glucose levels.

“We want to make it easy to get healthy,” said Mohit Kumar, CEO of Ultrahuman. “At Ultrahuman, we’re deep believers in passive personalised health, specifically in a health platform that requires very minimal effort from a user’s perspective. This perfectly aligns with the philosophy of LazyCo.”

Ultrahuman was started by Kumar and Vatsal Singhal, who were also co-founders at Runnr which later merged with Indian food delivery service Zomato. Kumar is an avid cyclist, biohacker and Brazilian jiu-jitsu enthusiast. Signhal is a cross-fit enthusiast and a biohacker. Kumar was training at MMA camp Tiger Muay Thai in Thailand. There he observed athletes train smartly via the use of data, recovery tools and protocols. He got together with Singhal and they came up with a vision for Ultrahuman where they can make the journey of fitness for people more personalised and impactful.

Ultrahuman is a venture-backed start-up that has raised $25m to date. Investors include Alpha Wave Incubation, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Utsav Somani’s iSeed fund, and a range of marquee founders and angel investors including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer.