For the better part of a decade, Whoop established itself as the secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James was sure to slap on the company’s fitness bands during Hoop’s first year. Michael Phelps came along soon after. Other hoop wearers include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes, and Rory McIlroy. What is your message to the people? The world’s best performers use this device to track their bodies. You can too.
It worked. Whoop, a Boston-based health wearables company founded by Will Ahmed during his senior year at Harvard University, now operates in more than 200 countries and, according to Ahmed, grew revenue by more than 100% and reached cash flow positivity last year. This hardware (bands worn around your wrist, biceps, and torso) measures sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and an ever-growing list of biomarkers. The subscription model, which bundles hardware and software for $200 to $360 per year (which also includes the device itself, with no need to purchase it separately), has proven to be very stable. 83% of monthly active users open the app on any given day. According to Ahmed, that percentage is second only to WhatsApp.
The next chapter is even more difficult.
Ahmed, 36, wants Whoop to be more of a life-saving tool than a performance tool. Not only does it act as a constant health monitor, helping you recover from intense training, but one day you’re told out of the blue that you’re about to have a heart attack and need to go to the hospital.
The company has already announced medically-cleared features such as electrocardiogram monitoring, atrial fibrillation detection (a feature that warns of irregular heartbeats that can lead to a stroke), and what it calls blood pressure “insights,” and Ahmed said Hoop will be the first wearable to offer this feature.
The FDA took issue with that last point in a warning letter last summer, arguing that the feature constitutes medical diagnosis rather than health monitoring. Hoop said the FDA has “overstepped its authority” and continues to expand.
A blood testing partnership with Quest Diagnostics, which currently has more than 2,000 locations in the U.S., allows members to take blood tests and upload biomarkers directly to the app, where a clinician reviews the results along with Whoop data. A feature called Health Span calculates your biological age. Ahmed said this has been the company’s most popular feature since its launch last May.
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The device itself has no screen, notifications, or step counter. This decision was strategic from the beginning. “If you have a screen, you’re a watch,” he told TechCrunch over a Zoom call. “And if you’re a watch, you’re competing with a lot of other watches, because people never wear two watches.”
Not only can Whoop be worn with watches you already own, he suggests, but it can also be completely hidden and hidden inside your clothes, with the sensor slipping into your bicep sleeve, sports bra, or shorts. It’s safe to say that the vast majority of Whoop’s customers want to wear a band as a fashion statement, but when asked directly, Ahmed said the company’s clothing line, which launched in 2021, has grown 70% in the last year.
But Whoop isn’t the only one looking to move beyond its roots and bring everyone into its tent. Oura, the Finnish company that developed the smart ring that became Whoop’s most direct competitor, has built a loyal following, many of them highly qualified professionals who treat their bodies with the same rigor as their work.
Oura’s model works differently. Customers purchase the ring outright for about $350 and pay about $70 a year to access the platform. When I spoke with Dorothy Kilroy, Chief Product Officer at Oura last fall, she told me that their 12-month retention rate was in the high 80s, an impressive number for a wearable product, and that most of them end up in the drawer right away.
Both companies now claim that women are the fastest growing segment, and last fall the two companies announced a blood testing partnership within days of each other, a coincidence that neither side wanted to discuss.
Whoop’s numbers still reflect its beginnings. Ahmed is wary of sharing too many numbers publicly, but says hoops skews more male than female. He also said business is now split almost evenly 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 delivery, is that it didn’t have to convince its most famous users. At the Australian Open earlier this year, players including Carlos Alcaraz were told to remove their hoop bands midway through the tournament, even though they had been approved by the International Tennis Federation. The players pushed back. Whoop has brand ambassadors, Aryna Sabalenka being one of them, but others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner wear hoops under their wristbands, but they just didn’t want to wear hoops under their wristbands.
“It sparked outrage across the media,” says Ahmed, a little gleeful about the resulting coverage. “And it put even more of a spotlight on the fact that all of these extremely talented people naturally wear hoops because of the value they provide.”
Ahmed carefully guards it. The company has a long-standing policy of not offering stock to athletes in exchange for wearing the band. His reasoning? If I like the product, I will wear it regardless. Official partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour, and UCI Mountain Bike are done differently. It’s about introducing your brand to a wider audience that shares the same sensibilities.
By the way, Oura does the same calculation. The company, which was founded just a year after Whoop, is widely reported to be considering an IPO. If Oura goes public first, it will set financial benchmarks (revenue multiples, growth rates, retention metrics) against which Whoop will be measured. Whoop currently employs approximately 750 people and plans to hire an additional 600 people.
Ahmed reveals little about the matter. “If you focus on building great technology and growing your business, you’ll be happy with Hoop when you become a public company, regardless of who goes public first,” he says.
He speaks the same way throughout the conversation, when he has thought carefully about what to say and what not to say. Ahmed is captain of the Harvard University squash team and counts Ali Farag, who went on to become world No. 1, among his former teammates, but he is quick to point out that proximity to greatness should not be mistaken for greatness itself.
“You probably have the wrong impression of how good I am at squash just because I’m teammates with him,” he jokes.
He started building what would become Whoop in 2011, reading hundreds of medical papers while studying economics and government, trying to solve a problem he had experienced firsthand: overtraining without a reliable way to measure its effects on the body.
Whoop is not just Ahmed’s first company. That was his only full-time job. If you ask him if he would recommend that path to a founder sitting where he was in 2012, that’s the question he’s most open to answering.
For the right person with the right intentions, starting a company is “without a doubt the best thing you’ll ever do in your career.” But he added that “being an entrepreneur and trying to build something from scratch is a very painful experience, and I think it often gets buried under the glitz of funding announcements and milestones, but you have to have a pretty high pain threshold.” You need to be “more attached to the problem you’re trying to solve than the idea of being a founder,” he says.
He doesn’t seem to have much doubt as to which side of the line he is on.
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