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Oura announced on Thursday that it has acquired Doublepoint, a startup that specializes in technology that enables users to control wearables through simple, natural movements using a combination of artificial intelligence and biometric data. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move paves the way for the company to incorporate these controls into its smart rings.

“Doublepoint’s tech helps devices understand small hand movements, so interactions feel faster and more natural across different interfaces,” Oura wrote in a press release. “When layered on top of Oura’s continuous sensing and insights, it enables the creation of new kinds of quiet, helpful features that work in the background and make everyday life a little easier.”

The company believes its next phase of wearable AI will be powered by a combination of voice and gestures, and that its acquisition of Doublepoint will accelerate its vision to power more ambient AI experiences.

The acquisition follows a successful year for Oura and the smart ring market as a whole. The company was most recently valued at approximately $11 billion last fall. Oura has sold 5.5 million rings to date, a notable increase from the 2.5 million reported in June 2024. The company forecasts sales to exceed $1.5 billion in 2026.

The smart ring market itself saw shipments jump nearly 51% in 2025, according to market researcher IDC, with Oura leading the category, as reported by Bloomberg.

Oura says it’s gaining a team of AI architects and builders from Helsinki‑based Doublepoint, including its four founders, noting that they will be central to designing and shipping AI experiences that will define the wearables company’s future.

“As we continue to build the next era of Oura, strategic acquisitions play a key role in accelerating our growth and expanding what our devices and platform can do,” said Oura CEO Tom Hale in the press release. “Welcoming the Doublepoint team into Oura strengthens our bench with world-class talent, reinforces our long-term commitment to growing in Finland, and helps us move even faster to deliver intuitive, human-first experiences for our members across devices, services, and environments.”

Oura’s latest acquisition marks its fourth one. The company previously acquired Bay Area-based health tracking startup Sparta Science, metabolic health startup Veri, and digital ID startup Proxy.

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While most of the venture world has been chasing AI deals, Max Hodak — the co-founder and former president of Neuralink — has been working on a startup that claims to be on the verge of being the first brain-computer interface company to get a product to market.

Those claims haven’t gone unnoticed. Hodak’s startup, Science Corporation, said Wednesday morning that it has raised $230 million in a Series C funding round. A source close to the startup says the round granted Science Corp. a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion.

In the short-term, Science Corp. is betting on PRIMA, a chip said to be smaller than a grain of rice that, when implanted in the eye, works with camera-equipped glasses to restore functional vision to people suffering from advanced macular degeneration.

The startup hasn’t fully developed the tech itself: It bought PRIMA’s assets in 2024 from French outfit Pixium Vision, refined it, and completed trials that Pixium had started.

But the clinical results Science has since generated are its own. In trials spanning 47 patients across Europe and the U.S., 80% demonstrated meaningful improvement in visual acuity and were able to read letters, numbers, and words, the company says.

“To my knowledge, this is the first time that restoration of the ability to fluently read has ever been definitively shown in blind patients,” Hodak told TechCrunch in an interview in December. The startup’s device has also made the cover of Time magazine.

It isn’t clear when PRIMA will be available to patients, but the regulatory path is taking shape. Science Corp. has submitted a CE mark application for the implant to the European Union, and says it expects an approval in mid-2026, following which it’ll launch the product in the continent. It claims this timeline would make it the first BCI company with a product in market.

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The company told TechCrunch that Germany is likely to be its first market, as the country has established pathways for granting early access to new medical technologies. In the U.S., regulatory discussions with the FDA are “ongoing,” the startup said.

Science Corp. is also expanding its PRIMA trial program to include Stargardt disease and retinitis pigmentosa, inherited retinal conditions that are leading causes of vision loss in young adults.

The new capital will be used to fund commercialization of PRIMA, as well as to support the startup’s broader research portfolio. This includes a biohybrid neural interface program that involves growing engineered neurons from stem cells onto a waffle-like device that sits on the brain’s surface and forms biological connections with existing neural circuits.

There’s also a new business line inside Science called Vessel: An organ preservation platform that aims to develop miniaturized perfusion technology so that organs can be transported on commercial flights or maintained by patients at home, rather than in ICU suites.

Investors in the Series C include a mix of new and earlier backers, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator and Quiet Capital. IQT, the nonprofit investment firm that focuses on solutions that can be used by government organizations like the FBI and CIA, also invested.

The round brings Science Corp.’s total funding to $490 million. The startup currently employs 150 people.

Update: This story originally reflected the company’s pre-money, not post-money, valuation.

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Does a consumer hardware company need to get on the VC treadmill to succeed? Eleven years and 290 million products sold across 115 countries later, PopSockets has proven that the bootstrapped, low-dilution path more viable than the industry gives it credit for. The global consumer hardware brand was built on less than $500k, no institutional capital, and a philosophy professor’s determination. 

Watch as founder and former CEO of PopSockets David Barnett joins Equity to talk about how he scaled from a Boulder garage, stood up to Amazon at a $10–20 million cost, and eventually handed off the CEO role to someone who’d grown up inside the company. 

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