For the better part of a decade, Whoop sold itself as a secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James was convinced to wear the company’s fitness band in its first year. Michael Phelps came soon after. Other Whoop wearers include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes, and Rory McIlroy. The message to the public was clear: the world’s best performers track their bodies with this device, and you can, too.
That strategy has worked. Whoop, the Boston-based health wearable company founded by Will Ahmed in his senior year at Harvard, now operates in more than 200 countries. According to Ahmed, the company grew revenue more than one hundred percent last year and reached cash-flow positive. The hardware, a band worn around the wrist, bicep, or torso, measures sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and a growing list of biomarkers. Its subscription model, which bundles hardware and software for between two hundred and three hundred sixty dollars a year with the device included, has proven remarkably sticky. Eighty-three percent of monthly active users open the app on any given day, a ratio Ahmed says trails only WhatsApp.
The company’s next chapter is a harder sell. Ahmed, who is thirty-six, wants Whoop to be less of a performance tool and more of a life-saving one. He envisions a continuous health monitor that doesn’t just help you recover from a hard workout, but one day tells you, unprompted, that you’re about to have a heart attack and need to get to a hospital.
The company has already launched medically cleared features including ECG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection, which flags an irregular heartbeat that can lead to stroke. It also offers what it calls blood pressure “insights,” which Ahmed says makes Whoop the first wearable to offer such a feature. The FDA challenged that last claim in a warning letter last summer, arguing the feature constituted 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 over two thousand U.S. locations, lets members take a blood test and upload their biomarkers directly into the app. There, a clinician reviews the results alongside their Whoop data. Another feature, called Health Span, calculates your biological age. Ahmed says it has become the company’s most popular feature since its launch last May.
The device itself has no screen, no notifications, and no step counter. That decision was strategic from the start. Ahmed explains that if you have a screen, then you’re a watch, and if you’re a watch, you’re competing with a lot of other watches because people will never wear two. Not only can Whoop be worn alongside whatever watch you already own, it can be tucked away entirely. The sensor can be slipped into a bicep sleeve, a sports bra, or a pair of shorts, disappearing into your clothing. While the majority of Whoop’s customers likely wear the band as a fashion statement, Ahmed notes the company’s apparel line, launched in 2021, grew seventy percent last year.
Whoop isn’t alone in moving beyond its roots to attract a broader audience. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that has become Whoop’s most direct rival, has built a large and loyal following of its own, largely among high-performing professionals. Oura’s model is different. Customers buy the ring outright for around three hundred fifty dollars, then pay roughly seventy dollars a year to access the platform. Retention at the twelve-month mark is reportedly in the high eighties, a remarkable figure for any wearable.
Both companies now say women are their fastest-growing segment. Last fall, they announced blood-testing partnerships within one day of each other, a coincidence neither side was eager to discuss.
Whoop’s numbers still reflect its athletic origins. Ahmed says Whoop’s user base skews more male than female. He also says the business is now roughly evenly split between the U.S. and the rest of the world, a shift from just a few years ago. Whoop formally ships to sixty countries.
What has set Whoop apart, in its telling, is that its most famous users didn’t have to be persuaded. Earlier this year, the Australian Open 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 like Aryna Sabalenka, others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who wear Whoops under their wristbands, simply didn’t want to take them off. Ahmed says the resulting media outrage further spotlighted that these talented people organically wear Whoop for the value it provides.
Ahmed is careful to protect that organic appeal. The company has a long-standing policy against giving athletes equity in exchange for wearing the band. His reasoning is that if they like the product, they’ll wear it regardless. Formal partnerships with organizations like Ferrari, the PGA Tour, and UCI mountain biking are about putting the brand in front of larger audiences who share the same sensibility.
Oura is making similar calculations. Founded just one year after Whoop, the company is widely reported to be exploring an IPO. If Oura goes public first, it sets the financial benchmarks against which Whoop will be measured. Whoop currently employs around seven hundred fifty people and is in the middle of hiring six hundred more.
Ahmed gives little away on the subject of going public. He says if the company focuses on building great technology and growing the business, they will be happy when they are a public company, independent of who goes public first.
He speaks throughout with the care of someone who has thought carefully about what to say. Ahmed was captain of the Harvard squash team and counts Ali Farag, who became world number one, among his former teammates. He is quick to note that proximity to greatness should not be mistaken for greatness itself, joking that one would have the wrong impression of his squash skills based on that association.
He started building what would become Whoop in 2011, reading hundreds of medical papers while studying economics and government. He was trying to solve a problem he experienced firsthand: overtraining without any reliable way to measure its toll on his body.
Whoop isn’t just Ahmed’s first company; it has been his only full-time job. When asked if he’d recommend that path to a founder, he answers freely. Starting a company is, for the right person with the right intentions, without question the most extraordinary thing you can do in your career. But he adds that it is a very painful experience to be an entrepreneur and to try to build something from scratch. You need a reasonably high pain threshold that often gets lost in the glamour of fundraising announcements and milestones. You need to be more obsessed with the problem you’re resolving 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.