Whoop has LeBron – now you want your mom

For the better part of a decade, the Whoop sold itself as the secret weapon of serious athletes. LeBron James made sure to hit the company’s fitness band in the first year of Whoop. Michael Phelps arrived soon after. Other Whoop wearers include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes, and Rory McIlroy. A message to the public? The best athletes in the world track their bodies with this device, and you can, too.

It worked. Whoop, a Boston-based health wearable company founded by Will Ahmed in his senior year at Harvard, now operates in more than 200 countries, and, according to Ahmed, has increased revenue by more than 100% in the past year, and reached profitability. The hardware — a band worn on the wrist, bicep, or torso — measures sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and a growing list of biomarkers. The subscription model, which includes hardware and software for between $200 and $360 a year – the device itself is included, with no separate purchase required – has proven incredibly sticky: 83% of monthly active users open the app on any given day, a rate Ahmed says is second only to WhatsApp.

The next chapter is the hard sell.

Ahmed, 36, wants the Whoop to be a low-impact tool and a lifesaver — a continuous health monitor that not only helps you recover from hard workouts, but one day tells you, unannounced, that you’re about to have a heart attack and need to go to the hospital.

The company has already introduced medically cleared features that include ECG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection — an ability that flags irregular heartbeats that could lead to a stroke — and what it calls blood pressure “notions,” which Ahmed says makes Whoop the first wearable to offer the feature.

The FDA challenged the latter in a warning letter last summer, arguing that the feature includes health diagnosis rather than health monitoring; Whoop said the FDA “overstepped its authority,” and continued construction.

Today, a blood test partnership with Quest Diagnostics — which has more than 2,000 US locations — allows members to test blood and upload their biomarkers directly to the app, where the doctor reviews the results alongside their Whoop data. A feature called Health Span calculates your biological age. Ahmed says that it has become the company’s most popular item since it was launched in May last year.

The device itself has no screen, no notifications, no step counter. The decision was strategic from the beginning. “If you have a screen, then you’re a watch,” he told TechCrunch via Zoom call. “And if you are a watch, you are competing with many other watches, because people will never wear two watches.”

Whoop, he suggests, can not only be worn next to any watch you already own, it can be completely tucked in, the sensor slips into a bicep sleeve, a sports bra, or a pair of shorts, disappearing into your clothing. It’s probably safe to say that most of Whoop’s customers want to wear the band as a fashion statement, but when asked directly, Ahmed offers that the company’s clothing line, launched in 2021, has grown by 70% in the past year.

But Whoop isn’t alone in going beyond its roots in wanting to pull everyone into the tent. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that is a direct competitor to Whoop, has built a large and loyal following – especially among the type of fitness professionals who approach their bodies with the same seriousness they bring to their work.

Oura’s model works differently. Customers buy the ring outright for about $350, then pay about $70 a year to access the platform. When I spoke with Oura’s senior product manager Dorothy Kilroy last fall, she said 12-month storage levels were hitting the high 80s, an incredible amount for any wearable, much of which ends up in the closet quickly.

Both companies now say women are their fastest-growing segment, and last fall they announced a partnership to test blood within a day of each other — a coincidence neither side was eager to discuss.

Whoop’s numbers still show where it started. Although Ahmed is wary of sharing more statistics publicly, he says Whoop skews more male than female. He also says that business is now evenly split between the US and the rest of the world – something that has changed in the past few years. Whoop is officially shipped to 60 countries.

What set Whoop apart, at least in its telling, was that its most popular users didn’t need to be persuaded. The Australian Open earlier this year ordered players including Carlos Alcaraz to remove their Whoop bands mid-tournament, despite the device being approved by the International Tennis Federation. The players retreated. Although Whoop has brand ambassadors – Aryna Sabalenka is one – others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who both wear Whoops under their wristbands, just don’t want to take them off.

“It created a lot of media outrage,” Ahmed said excitedly about the result, “and it also brought up the fact that all these talented people are wearing Whoop because of the value it provides.”

Ahmed is careful to protect it. The company has a long-standing policy against giving athletes equity when changing bands. His thinking? If they like a product, they will wear it no matter what. Official partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour, and UCI mountain biking work differently; they are about putting a brand in front of a large like-minded audience.

Oura, by the way, does the same math. Founded just one year after Whoop, the company is widely reported to be exploring an IPO. When Oura goes public first, it sets financial benchmarks — revenue multiples, growth rates, retention metrics — against which Whoop will be measured. Whoop currently employs about 750 people and is in the process of hiring another 600.

Ahmed offers little on this subject. He says: “If we focus on building the best technology and growing our business, we will be happy with Whoop if we are a public company, independent of who is leading the public.”

He speaks in every conversation the way another does when he has thought carefully about what he should say and what he shouldn’t say. Ahmed was captain of the Harvard squash team and counts world No. 1 Ali Farag among his teammates – though he is quick to note that proximity to greatness should not be mistaken for greatness itself.

“Maybe you have the wrong idea of ​​how good I am at squash because I play on the team with him,” he jokes.

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 had experienced firsthand: overtraining without a reliable way to measure its toll 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 that approach to the founder sitting where he was in 2012, the question he answers freely.

Starting a company, for the right person with the right goals, is “without question, the most unusual thing you can do in your career.” But he adds, “it’s a very painful experience to be an entrepreneur and to try to build something from scratch, and you have to have a high pain that I think often gets lost in the glamor of fundraising announcements and milestones.” He says, you need to “worry more about the problem you’re solving than being an innovator.”

He doesn’t seem to have much doubt about which side of that line he is on.