What does it feel like to have giants like Samsung and Apple order dozens of your company’s product? What's it like when Apple executives hide their CES lanyards as they approach your booth to ask questions? What does it feel like to be the center of such attention?
If you’re Amaury Kosman, the French-American co-founder and CEO of Paris-based Circular, the feeling is, in a word, “frustrating.”
Kosman, who leads the six-year-old smart ring startup Circular, tells Laptop Mag from his booth at CES this week that all the attention paid to the company’s new ring, the Circular Ring 2, is frustrating because he knows Circular should be a bigger presence in the market. (Also, those lanyard-hiding execs aren't fooling anyone.)
The Circular Ring 1 debuted in the US at CES three years ago and sold a “couple tens of thousands,” Kosman says. But the Circular Ring 2 claims one major federal approval that no other smart ring maker — not Oura, nor Samsung — can.
Best wearable of CES 2025: Circular Ring 2
The Circular 2 smart ring is capable of ECG (electrocardiogram) readings. To get to the heart of the matter, this means that the ring on your finger can detect atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat — which can result in more than 400 beats per minute, according to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Kosman, who speaks with a slight French accent and whose mother hails from Madison, Wisconsin, tells Laptop Mag it took 10 months to gain approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Afib detection for the Circular Ring — a stamp of approval that neither Samsung nor Oura have for their rings.
His eight-person team based in Paris works to see their rings made in China despite efforts to build a ring entirely in France. With the Chinese ability to produce electronics at a massive scale, Kosman, annoyed now that Circular isn’t a bigger player in the smart ring market, may not cut a frustrated figure for long.
The Circular 2 ring starts at $349 and goes up to $549, depending on your finish (gold, silver, black, or rose gold). This is up from the $259 starting price of Ring 1, which one Redditor described as having a “plastic” feel.
Also, separating Circular from the pack is a digital sizing feature. In this feature, the user takes a picture of their hand with their phone, and from there, a ring size is detected with “95% accuracy,” Kosman says. The Circular 2 ring works with Android or iOS devices and has up to an eight-day battery life. Charing is done via a wireless charging dock.
Circular co-founder Amaury Kosman tells Laptop Mag that the Ring 2 will launch via Kickstarter in March and be for sale for $349.
