Whoop reports revenue growth and eyes expansion beyond athletes

The Boston-based health wearable company Whoop has reached cash-flow positive status after growing its revenue more than 100% last year, according to founder and CEO Will Ahmed. The company, which employs around 750 people and is hiring 600 more, has maintained high user engagement. Ahmed states that 83% of monthly active users open the app on any given day. Whoop operates in more than 200 countries, charging an annual subscription cost of between $200 and $360.

Ahmed, 36, wants to transition Whoop from an athletic performance tool into a continuous health monitor. The company aims to detect serious medical conditions, such as a heart attack. It has already launched features like ECG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection to flag an irregular heartbeat that can lead to a stroke. However, this shift has drawn regulatory scrutiny. The FDA (the US health regulator) challenged Whoop’s blood pressure “insights” feature in a warning letter, arguing that the feature constituted a medical diagnosis rather than wellness monitoring. Whoop also offers a blood-testing partnership with Quest Diagnostics (a blood-testing partner) and a feature called Healthspan, launched in May of last year, which calculates biological age.

This expansion brings Whoop into closer competition with Oura, a Finnish company making a smart ring. Oura is widely reported to be exploring an IPO, which would set the financial benchmarks for the sector. While Whoop uses a subscription model, Oura requires customers to buy its ring outright for around $350 and pay roughly $70 a year for platform access. Whoop formally ships to 60 countries, and both companies have recently launched blood-testing partnerships. Currently, Whoop’s business is roughly evenly split between the U.S. and the rest of the world, though its user base still skews more male than female.

To differentiate Whoop from competitors, Ahmed maintains a strict screenless design. “If you have a screen, then you’re a watch. And if you’re a watch, then you’re competing with a lot of other watches, because people will never wear two watches,” Ahmed said. This allows the device to be worn on the wrist or integrated into Whoop’s apparel line, which launched in 2021 and grew 70% last year. The band has seen organic adoption among professional athletes, such as players at the Australian Open who resisted tournament instructions to remove them. Ahmed, who started building the company in 2011, notes that entrepreneurship is a painful experience requiring a high pain threshold, which is often overlooked amid fundraising milestones. He advises that entrepreneurs must be more obsessed with the problem they are solving than with the concept of being a founder.

Why it matters

Whoop is attempting to transition from a performance-tracking tool for athletes to a broader health-monitoring device that can detect medical conditions, while navigating regulatory scrutiny and competition from rivals like Oura.