What are the latest funding trends in wearable technology?

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 booming in 2026?

Wearable technology funding is clearly stronger in 2026, and the increase goes well beyond a couple of giant rounds.

So far this year, we have tracked 40 financings across 36 wearable technology companies. The comparable period produced 25 deals across 24 companies in 2025 and 22 deals across 22 companies in 2024. That puts deal activity up 60% year over year, while the number of funded companies is up 50%.

The dollar increase is much bigger. Exact disclosed capital has reached $1.18 billion, versus $360 million in the comparable 2025 period and $210.5 million two years ago. Those headline figures are heavily distorted by large transactions, especially WHOOP's $575 million Series G, so we also stripped out every round above $50 million. Even then, current funding comes to $168.6 million, compared with $110 million last year and $80.5 million in 2024.

There is another useful benchmark. Before the fourth quarter even starts, 2026 has already passed the entire 2024 and 2025 calendar years on deal count. Exact-known capital is also roughly 2.5 to 2.7 times either previous full-year total.

The main caveat sits with round amounts. Only 16 of the 40 current financings have a precise USD amount we can safely use, compared with 52% coverage last year and 77% two years ago. We are much more confident saying that funding activity has accelerated than claiming that the typical round has suddenly become several times larger.

Measure	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD	Change vs 2025
Deals	40	25	22	+60.0%
Funded companies	36	24	22	+50.0%
Exact-known capital	$1.180B	$360.0M	$210.5M	+227.9%
Capital excluding >$50M	$168.6M	$110.0M	$80.5M	+53.2%
Capital excluding >$100M	$455.4M	$110.0M	$210.5M	+313.9%
Largest round	$575M	$250M	$70M	+130%
First-financing share	32.5%	20.0%	13.6%	+12.5 pp
Later-stage deal share	30.0%	16.0%	22.7%	+14.0 pp
Exact-amount coverage	40.0%	52.0%	77.3%	−12.0 pp

Is WHOOP doing all the work behind the wearable funding boom?

WHOOP makes the 2026 wearable funding total look much bigger, but the underlying market would still be growing strongly without it.

WHOOP's $575 million Series G represents 48.7% of all exact-known capital we tracked this year. One company producing almost half the dollars obviously changes the headline.

The more useful comparison is what happens below the biggest deals. After removing every financing above $50 million, current funding is still 53% higher than in the comparable 2025 period. Deal activity has also risen independently of those dollars.

The upper end looks different from last year too. Six exact rounds have crossed $50 million this year, compared with just one in the equivalent 2025 period. Alongside WHOOP, Even Realities raised $150 million, VITURE raised $100 million, XREAL disclosed a large strategic financing and Temple started life with an unusually large $54 million round.

Capital is still concentrated, but less brutally than it was last year. XPANCEO alone represented 69.4% of exact-known 2025 YTD capital. WHOOP's share is lower at 48.7%, because there is now a much bigger group of $50 million-plus transactions around it.

Are more wearable startups actually getting funded now?

Yes. More wearable startups are getting funded in 2026, rather than the same handful of companies simply raising more money.

We found 36 different funded companies so far this year. That compares with 24 over the same period last year and 22 two years ago.

Repeated fundraising only explains a small part of the increase. Looki, Rokid and Ultrahuman each appear more than once in the current period, yet the overall company count still jumps by 12 year over year.

New entrants are also showing up much more often. We classify 13 current deals as first financings based on the public financing history we could establish, versus five last year and three in 2024.

That gives the boom a different shape. Investors are spending more on established wearable companies, but they are also letting a much larger new cohort into the market.

Are wearable funding rounds really getting much bigger?

Large wearable rounds are getting much more common, although the apparent explosion in the median round is less convincing.

The visible median financing is currently $35.5 million, compared with $5.53 million last year and $5 million in 2024. The average reaches $73.8 million.

We would not treat those numbers as the real market median or average. Sixty percent of this year's deals do not have an exact usable amount, and many of the missing values are Chinese Seed, Pre-A or other early financings. That missing group could materially lower the true midpoint.

The evidence is much cleaner at the top of the distribution. We have six known rounds above $50 million today. Series B alone accounts for $300 million of exact capital, while Series D and later accounts for $642.8 million.

So the high end has unquestionably moved upward. How far the normal wearable round has moved remains much harder to establish.

Are early-stage wearable startups getting squeezed out?

Early-stage wearable startups are losing share of the market, but they are still closing more deals than they did last year.

Seed and Series A make up 50% of current deals, down from 68% in the comparable 2025 period. Read on its own, that looks like a fairly sharp retreat.

The absolute numbers tell a different story. We counted 20 Seed and Series A financings this year, compared with 17 last year. Early-stage funding has grown; later-stage activity has simply grown faster.

That fits what we see in company age as well. The median funded company is around three years old today, slightly younger than last year's cohort despite the rise in later-stage deals. Current Seed companies have a median age of roughly two years, while Series B, C and D+ companies are progressively older.

Temple shows why stage labels deserve some caution. Its $54 million first financing was reported by TechCrunch as a friends-and-family round at a roughly $190 million valuation while the product was still being developed. Calling that a normal Seed financing would give the wrong picture of what an early wearable company usually raises.

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

Smart glasses are currently the clearest broad winner in wearable funding.

We tracked 14 smart-glasses financings, giving the category 35% of all current deals. Its share was 28% in the comparable 2025 period.

The capital shift is even stronger. Smart glasses account for $329.8 million of exact-known funding, or 27.9% of the market, versus roughly 12% last year.

Several companies are behind that move. Even Realities raised $150 million, VITURE raised $100 million and XREAL secured another major financing. Rokid also attracted a cluster of strategic investments, although we treat its deal count with some caution because several subscriptions may be parts of the same broader financing process.

Smart glasses stand out from categories where one huge deal creates almost the entire result. More companies are raising, the deal share is rising and multiple companies have reached serious growth-round scale.

Wearable category	2026 deals	Deal share	Change vs 2025	Exact capital
Smart Wearables	19	47.5%	−8.5 pp	$265.1M
Smart Glasses	14	35.0%	+7.0 pp	$329.8M
Connected Hearables	3	7.5%	+3.5 pp	$10.5M
Smartwatches	2	5.0%	+1.0 pp	Undisclosed
Fitness Bands	1	2.5%	+2.5 pp	$575M
XR Headsets	1	2.5%	−5.5 pp	Undisclosed
Total	40	100%	—	$1.180B exact-known

Why are smart glasses attracting so much money now?

Smart glasses have become easier for investors to take seriously because there is now more evidence of real users, better products and an industrial supply chain forming around them.

Even Realities is a useful example. Around its $150 million financing, CEO Will Wang said the company had passed its original 10,000-unit sales target, grown from roughly 30–40 employees in 2024 to several hundred and built more than half of its user base in the United States. Those are still company-reported figures, but they are a lot more tangible than a prototype and a market-size forecast.

XREAL is moving in the same direction from another angle. Its latest funding came from supply-chain partners and other investors, while the company is now working closely with Google around Android XR, Qualcomm on computing hardware and ASUS on gaming glasses. That gives XREAL both a product roadmap and a much larger technology ecosystem around it.

Further upstream, EssilorLuxottica and Applied Materials have begun working together on scalable optical systems for next-generation smart eyewear. Applied Materials has also introduced an integrated smart-glasses visual system combining waveguides, sensing, vision correction and other components.

These developments do not prove why venture investors wrote each check. They do show why smart glasses feel different today from a few years ago: there are products in customers' hands, companies reaching meaningful scale and major industrial players working on the hard manufacturing problems behind the category.

Is the rest of wearable technology losing momentum to smart glasses?

No. Smart glasses are gaining attention quickly, but the broader wearable market is still producing plenty of new deals.

Smart Wearables remain the biggest category by volume, with 19 financings today versus 14 last year. Their capital share has fallen dramatically, but the comparison is distorted by XPANCEO's $250 million smart-contact-lens round in 2025.

The current Smart Wearables cohort is also unusually young. Its median company age is roughly two years, compared with about 4.5 years in the previous period. That looks more like a fresh wave of companies entering the market than investors abandoning the category.

Connected Hearables have also moved from one deal last year to three today, although the numbers are too small to build a big story around them.

Fitness Bands illustrate the opposite problem. The category has 48.7% of current exact-known capital, but every dollar comes from WHOOP. The headline is huge while the category breadth is basically nonexistent.

Are investors betting on new wearable startups or established winners?

Wearable investors are currently funding both new entrants and established winners, which is one of the more unusual features of this year's market.

First financings now account for 32.5% of all deals. Follow-ons still dominate at 67.5%, and they absorb nearly all the large-dollar capital.

That creates two very different funding markets. At the entry end, we see young businesses testing new health sensors, AI interfaces, smart rings, glasses and other form factors. At the mature end, companies such as WHOOP, Even Realities, VITURE and XREAL can raise tens or hundreds of millions to expand internationally, build manufacturing capacity or deepen their platforms.

The known median first financing is $7 million, compared with $50 million for follow-ons. Those figures should be treated as directional because amount coverage is incomplete, but the gap gives a good sense of how far apart the two ends of the market have become.

As seen above, the sharp rise in first financings also makes it difficult to argue that today's growth is simply investors recycling money into yesterday's winners.

Funding history	2026	2025	2024
First financings	13	5	3
First-financing share	32.5%	20.0%	13.6%
Exact first-financing capital	$78.5M	$0.9M	$6.6M
Median known first financing	$7.0M	$0.46M	$1.25M
Follow-on financings	27	20	19
Follow-on share	67.5%	80.0%	86.4%
Exact follow-on capital	$1.102B	$359.1M	$203.9M
Median known follow-on	$50M	$8.0M	$5.5M

Is Asia-Pacific taking over wearable technology funding?

Asia-Pacific has become the center of wearable deal activity this year, although North America still takes most of the disclosed money.

We found 26 Asia-Pacific financings, equal to 65% of current deals. The region had 10 deals and a 40% share in the comparable 2025 period.

China is doing much of the work, especially in smart glasses. XREAL, Rokid, VITURE and a much longer group of newer businesses are being financed alongside Indian companies building health rings, AI wearables and other devices.

North America looks almost inverted. It accounts for 11 deals, or 27.5% of the total, yet captures 62.9% of exact-known dollars because WHOOP sits there.

Europe has gone the other way on volume, dropping from 36% of comparable-period deals to 7.5% currently. Three deals are too few to call this a permanent retreat, but the decline is large enough to watch.

For now, wearable funding has two geographic centers: Asia-Pacific for the number and variety of deals, and North America for the largest checks.

Why are corporate investors showing up more often in wearable funding?

Corporate investors are becoming much more visible in wearables because the hard problems now include optics, chips, batteries, manufacturing, diagnostics and distribution.

Strategic investors participated in about 27.5% of current financings, up from roughly 12% last year and only 4.5% two years ago.

Smart glasses account for seven of the 11 strategic deals we identified. Conant Optical, for example, invested RMB180 million in Rokid and explicitly said the deal was intended to strengthen its smart-glasses position and deepen cooperation across the industry chain. XREAL has also brought in investors tied directly to its supply chain.

Health wearables show the same trend with different partners. Qualcomm Ventures and Labcorp joined Ultrahuman's latest financing, while Abbott participated in WHOOP's Series G.

The names make the shift more interesting than the percentage alone. These companies bring optical manufacturing, semiconductors, healthcare infrastructure, laboratories or distribution networks that a venture fund cannot provide. These days, building a serious wearable company increasingly means plugging into a much larger hardware and healthcare ecosystem.

Is wearable funding turning into an AI and health story?

Yes. A growing part of wearable funding now revolves around AI interfaces and continuous health intelligence rather than basic activity tracking.

WHOOP is a good illustration of where the mature end is going. Around its Series G, the company said 2025 bookings had grown 103%, that it exited the year at a $1.1 billion bookings run rate and that it had more than 2.5 million members. WHOOP is also adding AI-driven health features and clinician access as it pushes beyond sports performance.

Ultrahuman is making a similar shift in positioning. Its latest financing brought in Qualcomm Ventures and Labcorp, while the company described its goal as building a human-computer interface around sleep, cardiovascular health, metabolism, hormones, blood biomarkers and recovery.

The glasses side is moving toward AI as well. Rokid is integrating more agent-like AI functionality, while XREAL's Android XR work with Google brings Gemini and spatial computing much closer to the device itself.

The category now has more ways to create value than simply selling a piece of hardware. Subscription revenue, health intelligence, software ecosystems, clinical services and AI interfaces can all sit on top of the device. That makes the funding story broader than a market built entirely around replacing one tracker with another.

What is actually changing in wearable funding right now?

Wearable funding is currently expanding in more places at once: more companies are raising, more first-time financings are appearing, large growth rounds are more common, and smart glasses have become a serious financing category.

The biggest change underneath the headline is breadth. Deal count is growing faster than we would expect from a market driven only by WHOOP or a few established companies. New-company formation is also much healthier than it was in the previous two comparable periods.

At the same time, the top of the market has become much deeper. WHOOP remains exceptional, but the presence of Even Realities, VITURE, XREAL and other large financings means the growth-round layer is no longer a one-company story.

Smart glasses are where the clearest category rotation is happening. Their share of both deals and capital is rising, while product adoption, new optical technologies and strategic supply-chain involvement give investors more concrete reasons to pay attention.

The market has also become more mature without shutting out younger companies. Later-stage share is up sharply, yet the number of Seed and Series A deals has still increased. Those two developments can coexist because the entire market has grown.

Strategic capital may be the most interesting structural change after smart glasses. Corporate participation has more than doubled year over year, and the investors increasingly come from industries that directly determine whether wearable products can be built, distributed and integrated into healthcare or consumer-electronics ecosystems.

The figure we would be most careful with is the $35.5 million visible median round. Exact amount coverage is only 40% today, so we do not have enough evidence to say that a normal wearable startup can suddenly raise seven times what it could two years ago.

The broader conclusion is much firmer. Wearable technology funding is stronger today because the market itself has widened, while a new layer of bigger, more mature and more strategically backed companies has formed on top of it.