For the better part of a decade, Whoop sold itself as a secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James was convinced to slap the company’s gym in Woop’s first year. Michael Phelps came right after. Other Whoop users include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes and Rory McIlroy. The message to the public? The best performers in the world monitor their bodies with this device, and you can too.
It has worked. Whoop, the 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, grew revenue by more than 100% last year while also turning cash flow positive. The 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 — including the device itself, with no separate purchase required — has proven extremely sticky: 83% of monthly active users open the app every day, a ratio Ahmed says is second only to WhatsApp.
The next chapter is a tougher sell.
Ahmed, 36, wants Whoop to be less of a performance tool and more of a lifesaver — a continuous health monitor that doesn’t just help you recover from a hard workout, but one day tells you, unprompted, that you’re going to have a heart attack and need to go to the hospital.
The company has already launched medically-cleared features like EKG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection — a capability that flags an irregular heartbeat that could lead to a stroke — and what it calls blood pressure “insights,” which Ahmed says makes Whoop the first wearable to offer the feature.
The FDA disputed the latter in a warning letter last summer, arguing that the feature constituted a medical diagnosis rather than wellness monitoring. Whoop said the FDA was “overstepping its authority” and continued to build.
Today, a partnership with Quest Diagnostics—which has more than 2,000 locations in the U.S.—allows members to take a blood test and upload their biomarkers directly to the app, where a clinician reviews the results along with the Whoop data. A feature called Health Span calculates your biological age. Ahmed says it has become the company’s most popular feature since its launch in May last year.
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The device itself has no screen, notifications, step counter. The decision was strategic from the start. “If you have a screen, then you’re a watch,” he tells 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 can the Whoop be worn alongside any watch you already own, he suggests, but it can be completely clipped on, a sensor slipped into a bicep sleeve, sports bra or shorts, disappearing into your clothes. It’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of Whoop customers want to wear the band as a fashion statement, but when asked directly, Ahmed offers that the company’s clothing line, which launched in 2021, grew 70% last year.
But Whoop isn’t alone in moving beyond his roots and wanting to pull everyone into the scene. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that has become Whoop’s most direct rival, has built a large and loyal following of its own — largely among high-performance professionals who treat their bodies with the same rigor they do their work.
Oura’s model works differently. Customers buy the ring outright for about $350 and then pay about $70 a year to access the platform. When I spoke with Oura Chief Product Officer Dorothy Kilroy last fall, she said retention at the 12-month mark was in the high 80s, a remarkable number for any wearable, most of which quickly end up in a drawer.
Both companies now say women are their fastest-growing segment, and last fall announced blood test partnerships within a day apart — a coincidence neither side wanted to discuss.
Whoop’s numbers still reflect where it started. Although Ahmed is cautious about sharing too many figures publicly, he says Whoop leans more towards males than females. He also says the business is now about evenly split between the US and the rest of the world – a change from just a few years ago. Whoop officially ships to 60 countries.
What has set Whoop apart, at least in its narrative, is that its most famous users didn’t need convincing. The Australian Open earlier this year instructed players, including Carlos Alcaraz, to remove their Whoop bands mid-tournament, despite the device being approved by the International Tennis Federation. The players pushed back. Although Whoop has brand ambassadors — Aryna Sabalenka is one — others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who wear Whoops under their wristbands, just didn’t want to take them off.
“It created a whole series of outrage from the media,” Ahmed says with some glee at the resulting coverage, “and further highlighted the fact that all these very talented people just organically wear Whoop because of the value it provides.”
Ahmed makes sure to protect it. The company has a longstanding policy against giving athletes equity in exchange for wearing the band. His rationale? If they like the product, they will wear it regardless. Official partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour and UCI mountain biking work differently. they are going to put the brand in front of a larger audience that shares the same sensibility.
By the way, Oura 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 in the midst of hiring 600 more.
Ahmed says little on the matter. “If we focus on building great technology and growing our business,” he says, “we’ll be happy with Whoop when we’re a public company, regardless of who goes public first.”
He speaks throughout the conversation in the way one does when he has thought carefully about what he should and should not say. Ahmed captained Harvard’s squash team and counts world number one Ali Farag among his former teammates — though he’s quick to note that proximity to greatness shouldn’t be mistaken for greatness.
“You probably have the wrong idea of how good I am at squash based on being teammates with him,” he jokes.
He began building what would become Whoop in 2011 by reading hundreds of medical papers while studying economics and government, trying to solve a problem he had experienced firsthand: overtraining without any reliable way to measure the effects on his body.
Whoop isn’t just Ahmed’s first company. It was his only full-time job. When I ask if he would recommend this path to a founder sitting where he was in 2012, it’s the question he answers most freely.
Starting a company is, for the right person with the right intentions, “undoubtedly the most extraordinary thing you can do in your career.” But it is, he adds, “a very painful experience being an entrepreneur and trying to build something from scratch, and you have to have a pretty high pain threshold that I think often gets lost in the glamor of fundraising announcements and milestones.” You have to be, he says, “more obsessed with the problem you’re solving than with the idea of being a founder.”
He doesn’t seem to have much doubt about which side of that line he is on.
