For the better part of a decade, Whoop has marketed itself as a secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James agreed to punch the company’s fitness team during Whoop’s first year. Soon Michael Phelps arrived. Other Whoop wearers include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes and Rory McIlroy. A message to the public? The world’s best performers track their bodies with this device, and you can too.
It worked. Whoop, the Boston-based health wearable company founded by Will Ahmed during his last year at Harvard, now operates in more than 200 countries and, according to Ahmed, grew revenue by more than 100% last year, as well as turning cash flow positive. The device — a band worn around the wrist, biceps or torso — measures sleep, recovery, heart rate variability and a growing list of biomarkers. The subscription model, which bundles the hardware and software from $200 to $360 a year—not including the device itself, requires no separate purchase—has proven quite sticky: 83% of monthly active users open the app on any given day, a rate that Ahmed says trails only WhatsApp.
The next chapter is a harder sell.
Ahmed, 36, wants the Whoop to be less of a performance tool and more of a lifesaver—a continuous health monitor that not only helps you recover from a hard workout, but also tells you that one day you’re going to have a heart attack and need to go to the hospital.
The company has already rolled out medically-cleared features including ECG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection — an ability to flag an irregular heartbeat that can lead to a stroke — which Ahmed says is the first wearable Whoop offers.
The FDA objected to the latter in a warning letter last summer, arguing that the feature is a medical diagnosis, not health monitoring; Whoop said the FDA “exceeded its authority” and continued to build.
Today, a blood test 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 alongside their 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, you’re a watch,” he tells TechCrunch via Zoom call. “If you’re a watch, you’re competing with a lot of other watches because people will never wear two watches.”
Not only can the Whoop be worn next to any watch you already own, it suggests that it can be put away entirely, with the sensor disappearing into your clothing by tucking into a bicep sleeve, a sports bra or a pair of shorts. It’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of Whoop’s customers want to wear the band as a fashion statement, but when asked directly, Ahmed suggests that the company’s clothing line, which launches in 2021, grew 70% last year.
But Whoop isn’t alone in wanting to go beyond his roots and bring everyone into the tent. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that has become Whoop’s most direct competitor, has built its own large and loyal following among high-performance professionals who treat their bodies with the same seriousness they bring to their work.
Ouran’s model works differently. Customers buy the ring for about $350, then pay about $70 a year to access the platform. When we spoke to Oura Chief Product Officer Dorothy Kilroy last fallat the 12-month mark, he said, retention levels hit 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 they announced a blood test partnership within one day a coincidence that neither side wanted to discuss.
Whoop’s numbers still reflect where it started. While Ahmed is wary of sharing too many numbers publicly, he says Whoop skews more men than women. He also says business is now roughly evenly split between the U.S. and the rest of the world — a change from just a few years ago. Whoop officially ships to 60 countries.
What sets Whoop apart, at least in its own words, is that it doesn’t have to please its most popular users. Earlier this year, the Australian Open ordered players, including Carlos Alcaraz, to remove their “Woop” headbands mid-tournament, despite permission from the International Tennis Federation. The players retreated. Although Whoop has brand ambassadors—Aryna Sabalenka is one—others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, both of whom wear Whoops under their wristbands, simply refuse to take them off.
“It caused a mass media frenzy,” Ahmad says with some glee about the resulting coverage, “and it highlighted that all these very talented people were just wearing Whoop organically because of the value.”
Ahmed is careful to protect her. The company has a long-standing policy against giving athletes equity in exchange for wearing the band. His reasoning? If they like the product, they will wear it regardless. Official partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour and UCI mountain biking work differently; they try to expose the brand to a larger audience that shares the same 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 against which Whoop will be measured — revenue multiples, growth rates, retention metrics. Whoop currently employs about 750 people and is looking to hire another 600.
Ahmad gives very little on the subject. “If we’re focused on building great technology and growing our business,” he says, “when we’re a public company, we’ll be happy with Whoop regardless of who goes public first.”
He talks like he’s thinking carefully about what someone should and shouldn’t say throughout the conversation. Ahmed was the captain of the Harvard squash team and counts world number one Ali Faraq among his former teammates – although he is quick to point out that proximity to greatness should not be confused with greatness.
“You have the wrong impression of how good I am at squash based on being teammates with him,” he jokes.
He began building what would become Whoop in 2011, reading hundreds of medical articles while studying economics and government, trying to solve the problem he first encountered: excessive exercise with no reliable way to measure its effects on his body.
Whoop isn’t just Ahmed’s first company. It was his only full-time job. When asked if he would recommend this path to a founder sitting where he was in 2012, that’s the question he answered most freely.
Starting a company is “definitely the most extraordinary thing you can do in your career” for the right person with the right intentions. But, he adds, “being an entrepreneur and trying to build something from scratch is a very painful experience, and I think there should be a fairly high pain threshold that often gets lost in the glamor of fundraising announcements and milestones.” “You have to be more engaged with the problem you’re solving than with the idea of being a founder,” he says.
He seems to have little doubt on which side of the line he is.
