Whoop has LeBron – now it wants your mom

For more than a decade, Whoop sold itself as a secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James was convinced to turn on the company’s fitness band in Whoop’s first year. Michael Phelps came soon after. Other Whoop wearers include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes and Rory McIlroy. The message to the public? The world’s best performers track their bodies with this device, and you can too.

It has worked. Whoop, the Boston-based health wearable company that Will Ahmed founded 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, as well as achieved positive cash flow. The hardware — 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 hardware and software for between $200 and $360 a year — the device itself included with no separate purchase required — has proven remarkably sticky: 83% of monthly active users open the app on a given day, a ratio Ahmed says trails only 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 not only helps you recover from a hard workout, but one day tells you, unprompted, that you’re having a heart attack and need to go to the hospital.

The company has already launched medically-approved features, including EKG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection — a feature that marks an irregular heartbeat that can lead to stroke — and what it calls blood pressure “insights,” which Ahmed says makes the Whoop the first wearable to offer the feature.

The FDA challenged the latter in a warning letter last summer, arguing that the feature constituted medical diagnosis rather than wellness monitoring; Whoop said the FDA “exceeded its authority” and continued to build.

Today, a blood test partnership with Quest Diagnostics — which has over 2,000 U.S. locations — lets members take a blood test and upload their biomarkers directly to the app, where a clinician reviews the results along 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 launching last May.

The device itself has no screen, no notifications, no pedometer. The decision was strategic from the start. “If you have a screen, you are a watch,” he tells TechCrunch via Zoom call. “And if you’re a watch, you’re competing with a lot of other watches because people will never wear two watches.”

Whoop can’t just be worn with the watch you already own, he suggests, it can be hidden away entirely, a sensor slipping into a bicep sleeve, a sports bra or a pair of shorts that disappears into your clothes. It’s probably safe to say that the overwhelming majority 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, which launched in 2021, grew 70% last year.

But Whoop is not alone in moving beyond its roots to want to draw everyone into the tent. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that has become Whoop’s most direct rival, has built itself a large and loyal following—mainly among the kind of high-performance professionals who approach their bodies with the same rigor 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 product manager Dorothy Kilroy last fall, she said retention at the 12-month mark 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 blood-testing partnerships within a day of each other — a coincidence neither side was eager to discuss.

Whoop’s numbers still reflect where it started. Although Ahmed is wary of sharing too many figures publicly, he says Whoop skews more male than female. He also says that business is now roughly evenly 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 has set Whoop apart, at least in its narrative, is that its most famous users needed no persuasion. 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. While Whoop has brand ambassadors — Aryna Sabalenka is one — others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who both wear Whoops under their bracelets, simply wouldn’t take them off.

“It created a whole set of media outrage,” Ahmed says a little gleefully about the resulting coverage, “and further highlighted the fact that all these very talented people just organically wear Whoop because of the value it brings.”

Ahmed is careful to protect it. The company has a longstanding policy against giving athletes equity in exchange for wearing the armband. His reasoning? If they like the product, they will wear it regardless. Formal partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour and UCI mountain biking work differently; they are about putting the brand in front of a larger audience that shares the same sensibility.

By the way, Oura does the same calculation. The company, founded just a year after Whoop, 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 around 750 people and is in the process of hiring 600 more.

Ahmed tells a little about the subject. “If we’re focused 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 talks throughout the conversation like someone does when they have thought carefully about what they should and shouldn’t say. Ahmed captained the Harvard squash team and counts world number one Ali Farag among his former teammates – though he is quick to note that proximity to greatness should not be confused with greatness itself.

“You probably have the wrong impression of how good I am at squash because I’m teammates 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’d experienced firsthand: overtraining with no reliable way to measure its toll on his body.

Whoop is not only Ahmed’s first company. It has been his only full-time job. When I ask if he would recommend that path to a founder sitting where he was in 2012, that is the question he answers most freely.

Starting a business is, for the right person with the right intentions, “arguably 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 fairly high pain threshold, which 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 be in much doubt about which side of that line he’s on.