Whoop has LeBron – now he wants your mom

For the better part of a decade, Whoop has sold itself as a secret weapon to serious athletes. LeBron James was convinced to slap 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 top performers track their bodies with this device, and you can too.

You succeeded. Whoop, the Boston-based wearable health company founded by Will Ahmed in his final year at Harvard, now operates in more than 200 countries and, according to Ahmed, has increased its revenue more than 100% in the past year and has reached positive cash flow. The device — 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 $200-$360 a year — including the device itself, with no separate purchase required — has proven remarkably consistent: 83% of monthly active users open the app on any given day, a percentage 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 life-saver — a constant health monitor that not only helps you recover from a strenuous workout, but tells you one day, without warning, that you’re about to have a heart attack and need to get to the hospital.

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

The FDA took issue with the latter feature in a warning letter last summer, arguing that the feature constitutes medical diagnosis rather than wellness monitoring; Whoop said the FDA was “exceeding its authority” and continued construction.

Today, a blood testing 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 vitals directly to the app, where a doctor reviews the results along with their Whoop data. There is a feature called Health Span that calculates your biological age. Ahmed says that it has become the company’s most popular feature since its launch in May of last year.

The device itself has no screen, no notifications, and no pedometer. The decision was strategic from the beginning. “If you have a screen, you’re a watch,” he tells TechCrunch over a Zoom call. “And 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 alongside any watch you already own, he suggests, but it can also be completely concealed, inserting a sensor into a bicep sleeve, a sports bra, or a pair of shorts, to disappear into your clothing. 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 reported that the company’s clothing line, which launched in 2021, grew by 70% in the past year.

But Whoop isn’t alone in moving beyond its roots to wanting to bring everyone into the tent. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that has become Whoop’s biggest direct competitor, has built a large and loyal following of its own — largely among the kind of high-performance professionals who treat their bodies with the same rigor as they put into their work.

The ORA model works differently. Customers buy the entire ring for about $350, then pay roughly $70 a year to access the platform. When I spoke with Dorothy Kilroy, Oura’s chief product officer, last fall, she said that product retention at the 12-month mark was in the high 80s, a remarkable number for any wearable device, most of which quickly ends up in a drawer.

Both companies now say women are the fastest-growing segment, and last fall they announced blood-testing partnerships within a day of each other — a coincidence neither party was eager to discuss.

Whoop’s numbers still reflect where they started. Although Ahmed is cautious about sharing many of the characters publicly, he says Whoop distorts males more than females. He also says that business is now almost evenly split between the United States and the rest of the world — a shift from just a few years ago. Whoop officially ships to 60 countries.

What’s special about Whoop, at least in its telling, is that its most popular users didn’t have to be convinced. The Australian Open earlier this year instructed players, including Carlos Alcaraz, to remove their Whoop bars mid-tournament, despite the International Tennis Federation approving the device. The players retreated. Although Whoop has brand ambassadors — Aryna Sabalenka is one of them — others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, both of whom wear Whoops under their bracelets, simply didn’t want to take them off.

“It created a whole bunch of media outrage, and it also highlighted the fact that all these very talented people are organically wearing Whoop clothing because of the value it provides,” Ahmed says happily of the resulting coverage.

Ahmed is keen to protect her. The company has a long-standing policy against giving athletes royalties in exchange for wearing the band. region? If they like the product, they will wear it regardless. Official partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour, and UCI mountain biking work differently; They’re about putting the brand in front of larger audiences who share the same sensibility.

By the way, Oura does the same math. The company was founded just a year after Whoop, and is widely reported to be exploring an IPO. If Oura goes public first, it sets the financial benchmarks — revenue multiples, growth rates, and retention metrics — against which Whoop will be measured. Whoop currently employs about 750 people and is in the middle of hiring 600 more.

Ahmed does not give much on this topic. “If we focus on building great technology and growing our business, we’ll be happy with Whoop when we go public, independent of who goes public first,” he says.

He speaks throughout the conversation the way anyone would when they are thinking carefully about what they should and should not say. Ahmed was captain of the Harvard squash team and counts Ali Farag, who became world No. 1, among his former teammates — although he is quick to note that proximity to greatness should not be confused with greatness itself.

“You might get the wrong impression of how good I am at squash based on being his teammate,” 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 faced firsthand: overtraining without any reliable way to measure its effect on his body.

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

Starting a company is, for the right person with the right intentions, “without a doubt, the most extraordinary thing you can do in your career.” But he adds: “It’s a very painful experience to be an entrepreneur and try to build something from scratch, and you have to have a reasonably high pain threshold, which I think often gets lost in the glamor of fundraising announcements and milestones.” He says you should be “more obsessed with the problem you’re solving than the idea of ​​being a founder.”

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