For the better part of a decade, Whoop sold itself as a secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James is sure to slap on a corporate fitness band in the first year of Whoop. Michael Phelps came soon after. Other Whoop users include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes, and Rory McIlroy. A message to the community? The best players in the world track their bodies with this device, and you can too.
It has worked. Whoop, a Boston-based health wearables company founded by Will Ahmed in his senior year at Harvard, now operates in more than 200 countries, and, according to Ahmed, increased revenue by more than 100% last year, as well as achieving positive cash flow. Hardware – a band worn around the wrist, bicep, or torso – measures sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and a growing list of biomarkers. The subscription model, which bundles hardware and software for between $200 and $360 a year – the device itself included, with no separate purchase required – has proven to be very close: 83% of monthly active users open the application on a given day, a ratio that Ahmed says trails only WhatsApp.
The next chapter is the harder sell.
Ahmed, 36, wants the Whoop to be less of a performance tool and more of a life saver — a continuous health monitor that not only helps you recover from hard workouts, but one day tells you, without prompting, that you’re about to have a heart attack and need to go to the hospital.
The company has rolled out medically-cleared features including ECG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection — the ability to indicate an irregular heartbeat that can lead to a stroke — and what it calls blood pressure “insights,” which Ahmed says makes Whoop workable to offer those features.
The FDA challenged the latter in a warning letter last summer, arguing the feature was a medical diagnosis rather than health monitoring; Whoop said the FDA “exceeded its authority,” and continues to build.
Today, a blood test partnership with Quest Diagnostics — which has more than 2,000 U.S. locations — allows members to take blood tests and upload their biomarkers directly to the app, where doctors review the results with their Whoop data. A feature called Health Span calculates your biological age. Ahmed says it has become the company’s most popular feature since it was launched in May last year.
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The device itself has no screen, no notification, no step counter. The decision was strategic from the start. “If you have a screen, then you’re a watch,” he told TechCrunch via Zoom call. “And if you’re a watch, then you’re competing with a lot of other watches, because people will never wear two watches.”
Not only does the Whoop work with any watch you own, he points out, it’s completely removable, with sensors tucked into a bicep sleeve, a sports bra, or a pair of shorts, disappearing into your wardrobe. It’s probably safe to say the majority of Whoop customers want to wear the band as a fashion statement, but when asked directly, Ahmed offered that the company’s clothing line, launched in 2021, grew 70% last year.
But Whoop isn’t alone in stepping beyond its roots to want to pull everyone into the tent. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that has become Whoop’s most direct competitor, has built a large and loyal following of its own – mostly among the type of high-performing professionals who approach their bodies with the same rigor they bring to their work.
The Oura model works differently. Customers buy the ring for about $350, then pay about $70 a year to access the platform. When I spoke with Oura’s chief product officer Dorothy Kilroy last fall, she said that retention at the 12-month mark was in the high 80s, a remarkable figure for a wearable, mostly fast-drawer.
Both companies now say women are their fastest-growing segment, and last fall they announced a blood-testing partnership one day apart — a fact neither party is eager to discuss.
Whoop numbers still show where it started. Although Ahmed is cautious about sharing too many characters in general, he says Whoop leans more towards men than women. He also said that business is now roughly split between the US and the rest of the world – a shift from just a few years ago. Whoop officially ships to 60 countries.
What sets Whoop apart, at least so to speak, is that its most famous users don’t need to be persuaded. The Australian Open earlier this year ordered players including Carlos Alcaraz to remove their Whoop bands mid-tournament, even though the device has been approved by the International Tennis Federation. Players are pushed back. Although Whoop has brand ambassadors – Aryna Sabalenka is one – others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who both wear Whoops under their wristbands, simply don’t want to take them off.
“It created a bunch of media frenzy,” says Ahmed, somewhat pleased with the resulting coverage, “and further spotlighted the fact that all these talented people just organically embraced Whoop because of the value it provided.”
Ahmad is careful to protect it. The company has a long-standing policy against giving athletes equity in exchange for wearing bands. The reason? If they like the product, they will wear it regardless. formal partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour, and UCI mountain biking different roads; they are about putting the brand in front of a larger audience that has similar sensibilities.
Oura, by the way, does the same math. Founded just a year after Whoop, the company is widely reported to be exploring an IPO. If Oura goes public first, it sets the financial benchmarks — revenue multiples, growth rates, retention metrics — against which Whoop will be measured. Whoop currently employs about 750 people and is hiring 600 more.
Ahmed gives a little away on the subject. “If we focus on building good technology and growing our business,” he said, “we’ll be happy with Whoop when we’re a public company, regardless of who goes public first.”
He spoke throughout the conversation as others do when they think carefully about what they should and should not say. Ahmed was the captain of the Harvard squash team and counted Ali Farag, who went on to become number one in the world, among his former teammates – although he was quick to note that being close to greatness should not be mistaken for greatness itself.
“You probably have the wrong idea of how good I am at squash on the basis of me being friends with him,” he joked.
He began building what would become Whoop in 2011, reading hundreds of medical papers while studying economics and government, trying to solve a problem he experienced firsthand: overtraining without a reliable way to measure the toll on his body.
Whoop isn’t Ahmed’s only first company. It was my only full-time job. When I asked if he would recommend that path to founders sitting where he was in 2012, that was the question he answered most freely.
Starting a company is, for the right person with the right intentions, “without question, the most amazing thing you can do in your career.” But it is, he added, “a very painful experience to be an entrepreneur and try to build something from scratch, and you have to have a fairly high pain threshold that I think often gets lost in the glamor of funding announcements. You have to, he says, “be more obsessed with the problem you’re solving than the idea of being a founder.”
He didn’t seem to have much doubt about which side of the line he was on.
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