For the better part of a decade, Whoop was sold as a secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James was convinced to put on the company’s fitness band in Whoop’s first year. Michael Phelps arrived shortly after. Other Whoop users include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes and Rory McIlroy. The message to the public? The best artists in the world track their bodies with this device, and you can do it too.
It has worked. Whoop, the Boston-based health device company that Will Ahmed founded in his final year at Harvard, now operates in more than 200 countries and, according to Ahmed, grew its revenue more than 100% last year, while also achieving positive cash flow. The hardware — a band that fits around the wrist, biceps, 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 to be notably demanding: 83% of monthly active users open the app on any given day, a proportion that Ahmed says is second only to WhatsApp.
The next chapter is a harder sell.
Ahmed, 36, wants Whoop to be less of a performance tool and more of a life-saving tool: a continuous health monitor that not only helps you recover from an intense workout, but one day tells you, without prompting, that you’re about to have a heart attack and need to go to the hospital.
The company has already launched medically-sanctioned features including ECG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection (a capability that flags an irregular heartbeat that can lead to a stroke) and what it calls blood pressure “insights,” which Ahmed says makes Whoop the first wearable device to offer the feature.
The FDA disputed the latter in a warning letter last summer, arguing that the feature constituted a medical diagnosis rather than wellness monitoring; Whoop said the FDA was “overstepping its authority” and kept building.
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 biomarkers directly to the app, where a doctor 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 its launch in May last year.
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The device itself has no screen, no notifications, and no step counter. The decision was strategic from the beginning. “If you have a screen, then you’re a watch,” he tells TechCrunch over a Zoom call. “And if you’re a watch, then you’re competing with a lot of other watches, because people will never wear two watches.”
Whoop can not only be worn alongside any watch you already own, he suggests, but it can also be stowed away entirely, slipping a sensor into your bicep sleeve, a sports bra or a pair of shorts, disappearing into your clothing. It’s probably safe to say that the overwhelming majority of Whoop 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, grew 70% last year.
But Whoop isn’t the only one going beyond his roots and wanting to bring everyone into the store. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that has become Whoop’s most direct rival, has built a large and loyal following, largely among the kind of high-performing professionals who approach their bodies with the same rigor they bring to their work.
The Oura model works differently. Customers purchase the ring directly for about $350 and then pay about $70 a year to access the platform. When I spoke to Oura Chief Product Officer Dorothy Kilroy last fallIt said retention at the 12-month mark was reaching 80, a remarkable figure for any wearable device, most of which quickly end up in a drawer.
Both companies now say women are their fastest-growing segment and last fall announced partnerships for blood testing. inside one day from each other, a coincidence neither party was eager to discuss.
Whoop’s numbers still reflect where it started. While Ahmed is cautious about sharing too many numbers publicly, he says Whoop skews more toward men than women. He also says the business is now split roughly evenly between the United States and the rest of the world, a change from just a few years ago. Whoop formally ships to 60 countries.
What has set Whoop apart, at least in the way it is told, is that its most famous users didn’t have to be persuaded. The Australian Open earlier this year ordered players, including Carlos Alcaraz, to remove their Whoop bands mid-tournament, even though the device had been 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 wear Whoops under their bracelets, simply didn’t want to take them off.
“It created a whole host of media outrage,” Ahmed says a little cheerfully of the resulting coverage, “and further highlighted the fact that all these very talented people are just organically using Whoop because of the value it provides.”
Ahmed is careful to protect him. The company has a long-standing policy against granting equity to athletes in exchange for wearing the band. Your reasoning? If they like the product, they will use it anyway. Formal partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour and UCI mountain biking work differently; it’s about putting the brand in front of broader audiences who share the same sensibility.
Oura, by the way, is doing the same calculations. Founded just a year after Whoop, the company is widely reported to be exploring an initial public offering (IPO). If Oura goes public first, it will establish the financial benchmarks (revenue multiples, growth rates, retention metrics) against which Whoop will be measured. Whoop currently employs about 750 people and is about to hire 600 more.
Ahmed reveals little on the subject. “If we focus 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 speaks throughout the conversation like someone who has thought carefully about what he should and should not say. Ahmed was captain of the Harvard squash team and counts Ali Farag, who went on to become world number one, among his former teammates, although he is quick to point out that proximity to greatness should not be confused with greatness itself.
“You probably have the wrong impression of how good I am at squash based on me 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 a problem he had experienced firsthand: overtraining without any reliable way to measure the toll on your body.
Whoop is not just Ahmed’s first company. It has been his only full-time job. When I ask him if he would recommend that path to a founder who was in the position he was in in 2012, it’s the question he answers most freely.
Starting a business is, for the right person and with the right intentions, “without a doubt, the most extraordinary thing you can do in your career.” But it is, he adds, “being an entrepreneur and trying to build something from scratch is a very painful experience, and you have to have a reasonably high pain threshold that I think often gets lost in the glamor of announcements and fundraising 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 have much doubt about which side of that line he’s on.
