Two ITC Complaints, Seven Companies, One Patent
A teardown of the ITC filings, settlements, and lone unresolved fight behind Oura's two-year campaign to enforce a single acquired smart ring patent against nearly its entire competitive field.
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Ultrahuman’s engineers spent the back half of 2025 rebuilding a ring around nine words of legal text: “a housing comprising an inner housing and an outer housing.” That phrase, lifted from U.S. Patent No. 11,868,178, is the reason the company’s flagship Ring Air was barred from import into the United States for roughly four months.
The patent belongs to Oura. Since March 2024, the Finnish-founded, San Francisco-run company has filed two separate complaints with the U.S. International Trade Commission, naming seven competitors across two cases and asking the government to keep their products out of the country entirely. Three of those companies have settled and now pay Oura for the right to keep selling. One has quit the U.S. ring market for good. One redesigned around the ruling and is back on shelves. Two, Samsung among them, are still fighting, and one of them has now sued back.
A patent Oura didn’t invent
The ‘178 patent traces back to Motiv, an early smart-ring maker that shut down years before Oura became a household name. Motiv’s intellectual property passed to Proxy, a keyless-entry ring company, in 2020. Oura acquired Proxy in an all-equity deal in May 2023, and the patent itself, covering a ring built from a separate inner housing and outer housing with a cavity between them for a curved battery, was granted on January 9, 2024. Nine weeks later, Oura used it to open a case at the ITC.
The first complaint: three companies, one filing
On March 13, 2024, Oura filed a complaint naming Ultrahuman (India), RingConn (China), and Circular (France), alleging that all three had copied the patented ring construction. The ITC instituted the case in April 2024 as Investigation No. 337-TA-1398.
Circular didn’t wait for a ruling. In June 2024, it agreed to a multi-year license and began paying Oura royalties to keep selling in the U.S. Ultrahuman and RingConn fought on. An administrative law judge sided with Oura in an initial determination in April 2025, and the full Commission affirmed a violation on August 21, 2025, ordering a limited exclusion order and cease-and-desist orders against both companies, effective that October.
RingConn took the settlement path next, signing its own multi-year license in October 2025 and getting itself removed from the exclusion order two months later. Ultrahuman didn’t. It appealed to the Federal Circuit in October 2025 and, rather than wait out the appeal, simply built a different ring: the Ring Pro, unveiled February 27, 2026, replaces the two-piece housing with a single continuously formed titanium tube and a snap-in cap, a construction that doesn’t read on the ‘178 claim’s inner-and-outer-housing language. U.S. Customs agreed in March 2026 that the redesign falls outside the exclusion order, and the Ring Pro is legally on sale in the U.S. today, even as Ultrahuman’s underlying appeal is still pending.
The second complaint widens the net
Oura went back to the ITC on November 18, 2025, this time naming Samsung, Reebok, Zepp Health (which makes the Amazfit Helio Ring), and Nexxbase (which sells the Luna Ring under the Noise brand). An amended complaint followed on December 9, and the Commission instituted the case that month as Investigation No. 337-TA-1468, asserting four patents this time, including the same ‘178 housing claim plus three more recent grants.
The pattern from the first case repeated almost exactly, just faster. Nexxbase signed a consent order in January 2026 and agreed to exit the U.S. smart-ring market for the life of the patents. Zepp settled in July 2026 on undisclosed terms, both sides dropping their claims. That leaves Samsung and Reebok as the only two companies, out of seven named across both complaints, that haven’t either settled, exited, or redesigned.
Samsung isn’t just defending itself. It has twice tried to invalidate the housing patent at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and lost both times, most recently in July 2026, and it’s now appealing that loss on a separate track from the ITC case itself. In December 2025, Samsung filed its own ITC complaint against Oura, instituted the following month as Investigation No. 337-TA-1478, asserting four Samsung patents and asking the Commission to exclude the Oura Ring from the country, backed by a parallel patent suit in Texas district court. As of this writing, no final determination has been issued in either the Samsung-Reebok case or Samsung’s countersuit, and the Galaxy Ring remains on sale while both run their course. Apple, the other giant with an obvious reason to enter this market, has stayed out of the ring fight entirely and built its sleep features into the iPhone instead, an approach one teardown of Apple’s Sleep Focus mode found stops at bedtime and does nothing once the alarm itself goes off. TechRadar has reported that Samsung has quietly shelved a planned second-generation Galaxy Ring, citing both the litigation overhang and underwhelming first-generation sales, though Samsung hasn’t confirmed that account itself.
This kind of hardware-patent fight has no real counterpart on the software side of the wearable-adjacent market, where the disputes tend to be about what a feature actually does rather than who owns a housing shape — a twelve-week accuracy check of Oura’s own ring turned up real gaps between its marketed Sleep Score and what polysomnography records, and a separate look at what Whoop’s Recovery and Sleep Coach features actually measure found a similar distance between the word “accountability” in Whoop’s marketing and what the product delivers. A wake-up accountability app like DontSnooze can’t be excluded from the country by a customs ruling, because there’s no imported housing for the Commission to examine; whatever edge a product like that has is behavioral, built around what happens after the alarm fires, not a claim over a ring’s inner and outer shell.
What one patent bought Oura
Winning that campaign never required Oura to out-engineer seven competitors on sensors or battery life. It required owning one claim, granted weeks before the first lawsuit, over how a ring’s shell is put together, and being willing to litigate it company by company until the market conceded. Circular, RingConn, and Nexxbase all made the same calculation: paying Oura or leaving was cheaper than fighting a case Oura had already won once. Zepp reached a version of the same conclusion on its own timeline.
The two holdouts say something different about the strategy’s limits. Ultrahuman showed that a determined competitor with enough runway can design around even a Commission-affirmed exclusion order in about four months, at the cost of a redesign it didn’t choose on its own schedule. Samsung showed that a company large enough to file its own four-patent countersuit doesn’t have to play by the settle-or-exit script at all. A single acquired patent turned out to be enough leverage to reshape an entire product category’s competitive map, right up until it ran into a rival with the size and legal budget to answer in kind.