October 17, 2025

{{#if first_name}}Hi, {{capitalizeFirst (lower first_name)}}.{{else}}Hi.{{/if}} It’s not just Oura, maker of the trendy smart ring, that’s getting investor attention these days. After consistently receiving less than 1% of venture funding each year, wearables are having a moment, Crunchbase data shows, with companies making everything from smart earbuds to smart contact lenses raising sizable rounds. Plus, last week was a busy one for big startup funding rounds, led by a $600 million deal for an obesity treatment maker, and how one entrepreneur pivoted when AI upended his company’s product roadmap.

👓 Investors are trying wearable tech on again

Funding to wearables — smartwatches, tech-enabled rings, and so on — is looking comparatively perky this year, Crunchbase data shows. Largely that’s due to a single company: Oura, maker of a smart ring that tracks health and wellness metrics that earlier this month raised $900 million at at an impressive $11 billion valuation. It’s not the only one, though. We put together a sampling of companies funded in roughly the past year innovating in this area.

Related Crunchbase list: Recently Funded Wearables-Related Startups

🏆 Top 10: Biotech dominates busy week

Last week offered a change of pace on the giant round front as it was a biotech company, rather than an AI startup, at the top of the ranks. Kailera Therapeutics, a developer of obesity therapeutics, led with a $600 million Series B. Other sizable financings went to companies offering fractional aircraft ownership, fintech services and hair-loss treatments.

📉 Cybersecurity investors pull back

Despite good-sized rounds for companies such as Quantinuum, Ontic and Vanta — not to mention several strong exits from the sector — cybersecurity funding and deal count both dipped in Q3, Crunchbase data shows.

🛟 How to keep customers on board during a product pivot

When it seemed the SaaS platform for sales engineers that Vivun had been building and selling was going to be made obsolete by AI, the team pivoted to rebuild their product for the future. In this guest commentary, co-founder and CEO Matt Darrow lays out the path the startup took to remain relevant in the age of AI while retaining many of its customers.

🫧 Are we in an AI bubble?

Amid significant enthusiasm for AI, there is also concern for how deals are playing out, especially the billions of dollars of capital flowing between interconnected players in the space, including Nvidia, OpenAI and Oracle. Investors are gambling huge amounts of capital on the future of AI, too afraid to make an error of omission. That leaves the obvious question: Are we in an AI bubble? In this guest piece, frequent contributor Dan Gray makes his argument in the debate.