INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
On the heels of Google buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion, another player in wearables and health technology has picked up a big round of growth
funding to continue expanding its business
Whoop, which makes a sensor-equipped (and screen-free) strap that continuously tracks your activities 24/7 and then provides a multitude of
performance metrics and other data based on that activity, has closed a round of $55 million, a Series D that it will use to continue
expanding its business into a wider range of wearables and analytics that can be gathered around them.Today the devices measure things like
how much strain a workout is causing you, how you are recovering afterwards, your sleep, whether training is having the desired effect,
whether you are working at a level that will be less likely to cause injury and how you are likely to perform
Looking ahead, the plan is to bring the sensors into more places than just the strap it currently makes
Boston-based company, and while Ahmed, who originally incubated the startup at Harvard with co-founders John Capodilupo and Aurelian
company.For some context, PitchBook notes that its last round of $25 million, in 2018, was at $125 million, post-money
anything about its financials, but its investor list is a good measure of the traction that Whoop has had to date, as a company pitching its
Individual investors included David Stern, the former NBA Commissioner; Ed Baker, former VP of product and growth at Uber, and former head
of International Growth at Facebook; Marc Randolph, co-founder and first CEO of Netflix; and Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab.Previous
Los Angeles Chargers offensive tackle Russell Okung and Mike Novogratz, the chief executive of Galaxy Digital.One notable shift Whoop has
seen in the last year is that it has dropped the price of its wearable from an eye-watering $500 down to free
Instead, it bundles the strap into a wider membership program that you do pay for, starting at $30/month and decreasing, depending on what
you would like to measure and use the data for (specifically, pricing is six months of data for $30/month; 12 months for $24/month; or 18
months for $18/month).Offering its devices for free is just one of the ways that Whoop diverges from the usual wearables story.At a time
when wearables have become part of the gadget pantheon, equipped with screens and acting as little computers in their own right, Whoop has
Apple has been seeing sales growth of its Watch outpace its other iconic products
Amazon is building a massive health services business that will likely also have a hardware component
for its data capabilities
