Wearable Technology Funding: A Quarter-by-Quarter Analysis

All funding deals in the wearable technology market over the last years

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the Wearable Technology Market.

Is wearable technology funding actually stronger now than it was in 2025?

Wearable technology funding is clearly healthier today than it was in mid-2025, although the improvement shows up much more consistently in deal activity than in headline dollars.

We tracked 58 financings from Q2 2025 through Q2 2026. The market started with eight deals in Q2 2025, stayed at eight in Q3, edged up to nine in Q4, then jumped to 17 in Q1 2026 and held almost all of that activity with 16 deals in Q2.

Capital tells a much messier story. Reported funding moved from about $82 million in Q2 2025 to at least $285 million in Q3, more than $980 million in Q4 and roughly $961 million in Q1 2026, before dropping to at least $128 million in Q2. Those swings look enormous until we look at the companies behind them. XPANCEO, Oura and WHOOP each reshaped an entire quarter on their own.

The cleaner takeaway is that more companies are getting financed now. Q1 2026 was especially important because deal volume, the median round and capital outside the very largest financings all strengthened together. Q2 then kept the higher level of deal activity even after the giant rounds disappeared.

Quarter	Deals	Companies	Known capital	Median round	Largest round
Q2 2025	8	8	≈$82.2M	$8.45M	IXI, $36.5M
Q3 2025	8	8	≥$285.2M	$1.63M	XPANCEO, $250M
Q4 2025	9	9	>$980.9M	$9.0M	Oura, >$900M
Q1 2026	17	17	≥$960.6M	$23.0M	WHOOP, $575M
Q2 2026	16	15	≥$128.2M	$10.22M	Hypershell, $50M

Was Q3 2025 basically an XPANCEO quarter?

Q3 2025 was mostly an XPANCEO quarter: one $250 million Series A generated 87.7% of wearable funding while the typical round became much smaller.

The headline number jumped 247% quarter over quarter, yet the number of financings stayed exactly at eight. Once we remove rounds above $50 million, capital actually fell 57%. The median financing also dropped by roughly 81%, from $8.45 million to $1.63 million.

Five of the eight Q3 deals were below $5 million. At the same time, three of the eight were first financings. Underneath XPANCEO, it was a quarter with quite a lot of young-company activity and relatively small checks.

XPANCEO itself was pursuing something far more capital-intensive. The company said its Series A would accelerate development and commercialization of multifunctional smart contact lenses combining XR, biosensing and other features. Later that year, it opened an expanded smart-contact-lens laboratory and showed several additional working prototypes at GITEX.

So the Q3 spike was pretty simple: investors backed one unusually ambitious deep-tech program at huge scale while the rest of the wearable funding market remained fairly small.

Did Oura make Q4 2025 look stronger than wearable funding really was?

Oura made Q4 2025 wearable funding look spectacular, although the rest of the quarter improved as well.

Oura raised more than $900 million, accounting for 91.8% of the quarter's reported capital. Without that financing, Q4 would obviously look nothing like a billion-dollar quarter.

The round also came from a company that had already reached unusual commercial scale. Shortly before the financing, Oura said it had sold more than 5.5 million rings, with over half of those sales occurring during the previous year, and that annual revenue was on track to reach about $1 billion.

Still, Q4 had more going on than Oura. Capital excluding rounds above $50 million climbed from $35.2 million in Q3 to $80.9 million, while the median financing recovered from $1.63 million to $9 million.

Where Q4 remained weak was new-company formation. Only one of the nine financings was a first financing. It was a recovery in funding for existing wearable companies, heavily magnified by one exceptional category leader.

What made Q1 2026 the real break in wearable funding?

Q1 2026 was the first quarter where wearable funding broadened across deal count, round size and company maturity at the same time.

The number of financings nearly doubled from nine to 17. Capital outside rounds above $50 million rose from $80.9 million to about $163.9 million. The median round reached $23 million.

WHOOP still contributed a huge $575 million Series G, but Q1 was much deeper than the single-company quarters that came before it. VITURE raised another $100 million after having already secured $100 million a few months earlier. XREAL added a large Series D financing, while Temple raised $54 million.

The companies involved were also spread further along the maturity curve. More later-stage businesses were raising, yet first financings were increasing at the same time. That combination barely appears elsewhere in this five-quarter period.

The commercial context was stronger too. WHOOP said bookings had grown 103% during 2025 and that the company exited the year at a $1.1 billion run rate. VITURE described its latest financing as capital for new products, international growth and broader XR applications.

Q1 looks like a genuine expansion in the funding market rather than another quarter where a single transaction happened to be enormous.

Did wearable funding really crash again in Q2 2026?

Q2 2026 wearable funding cooled sharply in dollars, while actual dealmaking stayed close to Q1 levels.

Reported capital fell to at least $128.2 million, an 87% quarter-on-quarter drop. Yet we still found 16 financings after 17 in Q1.

The disappearance of very large deals explains most of the gap. Q1 contained several rounds above $50 million. Q2 had none above that threshold, with Hypershell landing exactly at $50 million. Once the largest financings are removed from Q1 as well, the decline in comparable capital is closer to 22%.

The type of financing also changed. Seven Q2 deals fell into the $5 million to $20 million range, making that the busiest known size bracket. The $20 million to $50 million band, which had been much more visible in Q1, disappeared from the disclosed Q2 amounts.

There is also an important data issue: six of the 16 Q2 deals have no precise public amount. The $128.2 million total is therefore a floor.

Q2 kept almost all of Q1's deal activity. What faded was the unusually rich supply of large growth rounds.

Are more new wearable startups getting funded now?

More new wearable startups are getting funded now, and the increase has lasted long enough to look like a real change in market breadth.

First financings represented just 11.1% of Q4 2025 deals. The share rose to 29.4% in Q1 2026 and then 37.5% in Q2.

Company age moves in the same direction. The median funded company was five years old in Q4, four in Q1 and three in Q2. Those two measures come from different parts of our research, yet they point toward the same thing: younger businesses have become more visible in the funding mix.

The money remains much more concentrated among companies that have raised before. In Q2, first financings represented six of 16 deals but only about 17.5% of known capital. Follow-on companies still captured more than $100 million.

So today's broadening is mainly happening in the number of companies entering the market. Large checks remain harder for those newcomers to access.

Quarter	First financings	First-financing share	Follow-ons	Median company age
Q2 2025	1	12.5%	7	4.0 years
Q3 2025	3	37.5%	5	4.5 years
Q4 2025	1	11.1%	8	5.0 years
Q1 2026	5	29.4%	12	4.0 years
Q2 2026	6	37.5%	10	3.0 years

Are investors moving up-market toward later-stage wearable companies?

Wearable investors moved noticeably toward later-stage companies in 2026, especially when we look at where the dollars went.

During the three 2025 quarters, later-stage rounds represented only about 11% to 13% of financings. That share reached 35.3% in Q1 2026 and remained at 25% in Q2.

Capital moved even more strongly. Around 85% of Q1's known dollars went to later-stage financings. In Q2, the figure was still close to 64%.

Early-stage wearable companies are still getting funded in large numbers. Seed and Series A rounds accounted for more than half of deals in both 2026 quarters. Investors are backing both ends of the market: younger companies can still get started, while mature businesses command most of the larger checks.

That split explains how wearable funding can look younger by company age and more mature by capital allocation at the same time.

Are wearable funding rounds actually getting bigger?

Wearable funding rounds are bigger than they were during the weak patch in Q3 2025, but Q1's unusually rich financing environment has not become the new normal.

The clearest change is in the middle of the distribution. Q3 2025 had a barbell shape: five deals below $5 million and XPANCEO at $250 million, with relatively little in between.

Q1 2026 looked completely different. We found financings across the $5–20 million, $20–50 million, $50–100 million and $100 million-plus ranges. That spread is one reason the quarter felt deeper even before WHOOP is considered.

Q2 then moved back toward smaller checks. Seven deals sat in the $5–20 million range, while no disclosed round fell strictly between $20 million and $50 million.

A larger group of young wearable companies is entering the funding pipeline these days, but we still need to see whether enough of them can graduate into regular $20 million to $100 million follow-on rounds. That middle of the market looked strong in Q1 and thin again one quarter later.

Are smart glasses the hottest part of wearable funding right now?

Smart glasses currently have the strongest category momentum in wearable funding because deal activity, industrial backing and product launches are moving together.

Funding activity went through a clear U-shaped pattern. Smart glasses accounted for 62.5% of deals in Q2 2025, dropped to 25% in Q3 and 11.1% in Q4, then recovered to 35.3% in Q1 2026 and 25% in Q2.

The comeback looks more interesting than the original Q2 2025 concentration because the investor mix has changed. Rokid, BleeqUp, Future Intelligence and other glasses companies have attracted money from businesses connected to optics, batteries, electronics, hardware and media.

Shanghai Conant Optical gives us a particularly clean example. In a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing, Conant said it invested RMB180 million in Rokid's parent company specifically to strengthen its position in smart glasses, deepen industry-chain cooperation and create synergies with an established player.

XREAL is also moving deeper into a larger platform ecosystem. Its upcoming AURA glasses have been developed around Android XR, Google Gemini and Qualcomm's latest XR computing platform.

The funding follows a category that is becoming tied to a much broader supply chain rather than remaining a collection of standalone hardware startups.

Category	Funding pattern across our period	Current reading
Smart glasses	Strong Q2 2025, weak Q4, strong return in 2026	Strongest structural momentum
Smart wearables	High deal share across most quarters	Broad and established
Connected hearables	Absent early, 3 deals in Q2 2026	Early, still irregular
Fitness bands	Dominated by WHOOP in Q1	Too concentrated to call a category trend
Smartwatches	Very few financings	Early evidence only
XR headsets	One Q2 2026 deal	Too little evidence

Is smart-glasses funding backed by real demand yet?

Smart-glasses funding now has much better commercial backing than it did a year ago, even though the category is still early and very fragmented.

IDC's latest quarterly update gives us a useful reality check. Global shipments of XR headsets and glasses grew 35.3% year over year in Q2 2026. Audio and display-less glasses accounted for 70.3% of shipments, while display glasses increased their share to 14.3%. IDC still found Meta far ahead of everyone else, so this is hardly an evenly distributed market, but consumer adoption is clearly moving beyond a handful of experimental products.

The companies in our funding sample are also shipping or preparing products. XREAL is currently taking reservations for AURA, its Android XR glasses. The company says its first 2,000 Founder Priority Passes were reserved within 36 hours. Rokid says its AI-glasses campaign exceeded $3.6 million on Kickstarter with more than 5,000 backers, and the company has continued expanding internationally.

There is still a long distance between a promising product category and a large profitable market. Even XREAL, one of the best-established independent players, remains in a capital-intensive scaling phase.

As of now, the smart-glasses funding wave has more real customer behavior behind it than the category had during its earlier hype cycles. We use these later developments as context only; they do not change the funding totals for the period we analyzed.

Is wearable funding turning into a health-tech story?

A large part of wearable funding today is really a health-tech story, especially at the top end of the market.

The two largest financings in our five-quarter period came from Oura and WHOOP. Both companies increasingly describe themselves around continuous health data, prevention and personalized guidance rather than simple activity tracking.

Oura's commercial scale already supported that shift when it raised more than $900 million. The company later said it was on pace to surpass five million paid members and had built more than 1,200 partnerships across health, wellness and commercial organizations. More recently, it expanded its Menopause Impact Scale into ten external clinical and health platforms.

WHOOP is following a similar direction from a different starting point. Its Series G brought in Abbott and Mayo Clinic alongside financial investors. The company has since added on-demand clinician access and continued publishing research built from continuously collected wearable data.

Smaller deals show the same idea at another scale. Patronus raised €11 million around an emergency smartwatch and connected service for older adults; the company and its investor UVC Partners said it had reached 25,000 users and handled more than half a million emergency calls.

Wearable funding is spreading well beyond fitness gadgets. Health monitoring, prevention, ageing and clinical integration are becoming central to where companies are trying to build long-term value.

Why are strategic investors showing up more often in wearable deals?

Strategic investors are showing up more often because several wearable categories now sit directly inside larger health, optics and computing ecosystems.

Only 11.1% of Q4 2025 financings involved a strategic investor. That jumped to 29.4% in Q1 2026 and remained at 25% in Q2.

Smart glasses explain much of the move. Shanghai Conant Optical's investment in Rokid is unusually explicit: Conant itself said the purpose was to strengthen its smart-glasses strategy and deepen cooperation across the value chain. Other 2026 rounds brought in companies connected to batteries, electronics, mobile hardware and content.

Health wearables show a similar pattern. Abbott participated in WHOOP's Series G, while Mayo Clinic also joined the round. A few weeks later, Mubadala announced a broader partnership with WHOOP around preventive health research and a regional health platform in the UAE.

The computing ecosystem is moving closer too. XREAL's collaboration with Google and Qualcomm around Android XR and AURA is a commercial partnership rather than an investor relationship, but it helps explain why industrial capital is increasingly interested in this part of wearables: successful devices now depend on chips, AI models, operating systems, optics and distribution working together.

Corporate money is arriving for fairly concrete strategic reasons to own a piece of the ecosystem.

Is APAC becoming the center of wearable funding?

APAC is currently the clearest center of wearable deal activity in our sample, with two consecutive quarters above 60% of financings.

The region represented 70.6% of deals in Q1 2026 and 62.5% in Q2. Q2 is especially interesting because APAC also captured about 63% of known capital without relying on a single round above $50 million.

That is a much more diffuse regional pattern than the earlier quarters. Q3's apparent Middle East capital dominance came largely from Dubai-based XPANCEO. North America then dominated Q4 through Oura and Q1 through WHOOP.

The APAC shift also fits what is happening commercially around smart glasses. IDC reported that China's smart-glasses shipments grew 87.1% during 2025 to 2.46 million units. Chinese companies are now competing across display glasses, AI audio glasses, optics, operating systems and components rather than in one narrow product niche.

Two quarters are not enough to call this a permanent geographic transfer of the wearable market. For now, though, APAC has the strongest combination of startup activity, industrial participation and category breadth in our funding data.

Is wearable funding broadening, or are a few winners taking everything?

Wearable funding is broadening in company count and investor participation, while large-dollar concentration is still extreme whenever a category leader raises.

The concentration problem is easy to see. XPANCEO represented 87.7% of Q3 capital, and Oura reached 91.8% in Q4. WHOOP's share fell to 59.9% in Q1 because several other large financings happened alongside it. By Q2, the largest deal represented 39% of known capital.

Lead investors tell a different story. We do not see one small group of venture firms repeatedly controlling each quarter. Q1 had 12 financings with a known lead and 14 unique lead investors. Q2 had 12 lead-covered deals and 15 unique leads.

Across quarters, the repeats are limited. Khosla Ventures appears in Q2 2025 and again in Q2 2026. Ant Group appears in both Q1 and Q2 2026. No lead investor appears on multiple financings within the same quarter.

So the market currently has two kinds of concentration. A small number of companies can still swallow most of the dollars, while the investor base supporting the broader dealflow remains quite dispersed.

Quarter	Largest deal share	Deals with known lead	Unique leads	What stands out
Q2 2025	44.4%	7	7	Moderate capital concentration
Q3 2025	87.7%	3	5	XPANCEO dominates dollars
Q4 2025	91.8%	7	8	Oura dominates dollars
Q1 2026	59.9%	12	14	Several large rounds, broader lead base
Q2 2026	39.0%	12	15	Lowest top-deal concentration of the period

What is the funding trend actually telling us?

The biggest change is breadth. Wearable funding has moved from a market producing roughly eight or nine quarterly financings to one producing around twice that level, and Q2 2026 showed that the higher activity can survive without a giant round carrying the quarter.

The headline capital curve is still the easiest way to misread the market. Reading Q3 and Q4 2025 as a huge boom followed by a Q2 2026 collapse gives almost the opposite impression of what happened underneath. The largest checks disappeared in Q2; the companies did not.

New-company formation also looks healthier. First financings increased across both 2026 quarters and the median funded company became younger. At the same time, later-stage companies still absorb most of the money. The market is starting to replenish the bottom of the pipeline while continuing to finance established scale-ups.

Smart glasses have the clearest momentum right now. Their deal count recovered, industrial investors moved closer to the category, consumer shipments are rising and companies such as XREAL and Rokid are already pushing another product cycle. That combination is stronger evidence than capital share alone.

Health is the other major thread. Oura, WHOOP and smaller companies such as Patronus show how wearable businesses are moving toward continuous health data, prevention and clinical workflows. Strategic investors from healthcare and other industries are following that shift.

The weak point is still the middle of the funding ladder. Q1 briefly produced real depth between roughly $20 million and $100 million, while Q2 moved back toward $5 million to $20 million rounds. The next question is whether the larger group of young companies entering the market can turn into a steady pipeline of sizeable follow-on rounds.