Welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story. How does a wearable with no screen, no notifications, no GPS, and no cellular capability somehow become one of the most recognizable products in the game? Just ask Whoop.

In a market long dominated by tech giants like Apple, Google, and Fitbit, Whoop has carved out an entirely different lane. Much of its success has come from its ability to generate cultural cachet organically—appearing on the wrists of élite athletes like LeBron James and Rory McIlroy, and even Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles. Whoop CEO, Will Ahmed, has adroitly capitalized on those viral moments in real time, turning online controversy into fuel for the brand’s identity and growing its loyal community. 

As Ashwin Rodrigues reports for Inc., Whoop’s long term ambitions extend far beyond fitness tracking. What began as a performance wearable for athletes is evolving into a much broader personal health platform, powered by continuous biometric data, growing AI capabilities, and growing partnerships with leading health organizations like the Mayo Clinic. While incumbents raced to  build the next smartwatch, Whoop took a more selective approach. The company is betting that the future of wearables won’t be flashy or screen-based, but instead deeply embedded in how people monitor, understand, and optimize their everyday health. That conviction has turned the company into a booming business with a $10 billion valuation. 

In this piece, you’ll discover:

The $10 billion company has grown from a fitness band to a comprehensive personal health platform. So why is Ahmed’s heart rate up about new competition?

BY ASHWIN RODRIGUES

February 28,3:08 p.m. Operation Epic Fury is underway as news of a potential security breach in the situation room at Mar-a-Lago spreads. A photograph of President Trump sitting next to his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, shows Wiles wearing a black wristband. Is it an Apple Watch? That would break security standards—it could be recording or transmitting. Speculation runs wild on X.  

Will Ahmed doesn’t miss a beat. “It’s called a Whoop,” he posts. “It does not include a microphone, GPS, or cellular capability of any kind, and has long been on the NSA-approved PED list.”

“Given today’s performance,” Ahmed continues, “it’s likely she had a green recovery, low RHR, and high HRV.”

He would know: He’s Whoop’s founder, CEO, and creator. 

Whenever Whoop is mentioned online, Ahmed is there. In January, during the 2026 Australian Open, umpires instructed three players, Aryna Sabalenka, Carlos Alcaraz, and Jannik Sinner, to remove their Whoops during matches. Ahmed picked up his phone.

“Ridiculous,” he posted. “Whoop is approved by the International Tennis Federation for in-match wear and poses no safety risk. Let the athletes measure their bodies. Data is not steroids!” 

“Data is not steroids” is a phrase that Ahmed first used in 2016, after the NBA told Cleveland Cavaliers’ Matthew Dellavedova that he couldn’t wear his Whoop band during the game, and one he’s returned to many times since. The phrase has become a brand slogan—it was available on T-shirts for a while—and a rallying cry.

While the NBA has held firm on its prohibition of Whoop during games, over the past decade other major sports leagues began to allow players to wear the band, including Major League Baseball, the NFL, MLS, the PGA, and even Formula 1. After the uproar over the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open announced they will allow a trial run of wearables. 

Whoop sits on 24 billion hours of continuous physiological data from 2.5 million people who sleep, shower, and wake up with the device on their wrist, with membership increasing by more than 70 percent annually over the past two years. On March 31, Whoop announced a $575 million Series G that valued the company at $10.1 billion, nearly tripling its valuation since its SoftBank-led round four and a half years earlier, and that same month announced plans to hire more than 600 new employees. 

That momentum has attracted a broad range of investors, including traditional venture firms such as Two Sigma Ventures, Foundry, and Collaborative Fund, and athletes such as Kevin Durant, Tiger Woods, Patrick Mahomes, Larry Fitzgerald, and Eli Manning. The latest round expanded that circle further, adding the Qatar Investment Authority, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Rory McIlroy, who partnered with the company to share data from his 2026 Masters win. (Heart rate on the winning putt: 105 BPM) 

Abbott and the Mayo Clinic also participated in the most recent fundraise. (Abbott makes the glucose monitors and cardiac devices used in hospitals worldwide; Mayo Clinic is one of the leading health care institutions in the world.) What they’re buying isn’t just a fitness tracker—it’s a data set, possibly one of the most valuable data sets in the industry.

For health care institutions, a single blood test or annual physical only captures a moment. Whoop captures a longitudinal picture of a person’s health, taken continuously over months and years. Ahmed has been telling anyone who will listen that data isn’t steroids. Now they’re listening, because data isn’t a cheat code: It’s the thing that investors believe will make the company worth $10 billion and then some.

A Harvard squash captain meets his match

When I met with Ahmed in his office on the top floor of Whoop’s Boston headquarters, he was wearing a white Whoop on one wrist and a white monochrome Bvlgari timepiece on the other. A Whoop band is a recurring accessory on the wrists of the powerful: Jay-Z has been spotted wearing the device, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe pairs his with an Apple Watch; Lando Norris, McLaren driver and reigning F1 world champion, doubles up with a Richard Mille watch. 

Whoop has no screen, no face, no notifications. It doesn’t tell time. A watch is an object to be admired but Whoop is infrastructure, built to disappear into the background and collect biometric data around the clock.

In person, Ahmed, 36, doesn’t seem like a hyper‑responsive power user of Elon Musk’s social network. He speaks in detailed, even‑keeled sentences, with no apparent urge to fill pauses or perform for effect. He lives in Boston with his wife, Leily, a fashion designer and founder of Rosewater House, and after more than 15 years in the city, Boston has clearly grown on him. His office overlooks Fenway Park—the famous Citgo sign looms just beyond the windows—and despite growing up in New York on Long Island, he now counts himself as a Celtics fan. 

Ahmed now sees the future of Whoop as medical technology, but it began as a personal problem. Ahmed, a Harvard squash captain, overtrained. So he dug into the medical literature on recovery, turned it into his senior capstone, and eventually, a company.

The central question: Could you have a daily recovery score that told you how ready you were—whether to push hard or rest? His research pointed to heart rate variability (HRV), the slight time variations between heartbeats that signal your body’s stress or resilience. HRV became the foundation on which Ahmed and co-founders John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae began building Whoop in 2012.

Early funding came through a happy accident. While working at the Harvard Innovation Labs, the team happened to share neighboring desks with the Founder Collective. Eric Paley and Micah Rosenbloom of Founder Collective had previously sold Brontes Technologies to 3M for $95 million—they knew what a valuable prototype looked like. HRV had long been measured with an electrocardiogram, a medical device typically found only in hospitals and doctors’ offices, requiring several electrodes attached to a machine and affixed to a patient’s chest, which Ahmed calls “antiquated technology.” Whoop’s prototype demonstrated that light waves could do the same thing continuously, from under the skin. Founder Collective participated in the 2013 seed round, which raised $3.39 million.

Not all of the fundraising came so easily. Ahmed was in his early 20s with no business track record, pitching a hardware-software-data-health hybrid into a market crowded by Fitbit and Jawbone. Nike FuelBand had soured investor appetite before the company shuttered its wearables division in 2014.

But another break for Whoop came in 2014 when Ahmed scored a meeting with Mike Mancias, LeBron James’s longtime personal trainer. Mancias was impressed with the tech, became an adviser to the company, and introduced the wearable to James. Ahmed felt that rather than chasing endorsements, Whoop would go directly to trainers—trusted by athletes, and fluent in recovery in ways that agents and marketers often weren’t.

“They spend eight to 10 hours a day together—to know how hard to train today, to know when to pull back. When a trainer hands an athlete a tool that’s about measuring recovery and measuring exercise, it fits into their relationship,” says Ahmed. The strategy was starting to work, but the momentum was fragile.

The strategy was starting to work, but the momentum was fragile. In 2020, on an episode of Conor Holway’s The Golden Hours podcast, Ahmed recounted a pivotal moment: Several years before, he was watching an NBA game at his parents’ house on Long Island in New York when LeBron James appeared onscreen in a Kia commercial wearing a Whoop. It wasn’t product placement—James was wearing it by choice. At the time, only about 200 Whoop straps existed; the company had missed revenue targets, and it seemed like the company had over-invested in technology development, Ahmed told the host. Seeing one of the world’s best basketball players using his product on national television offered Ahmed a kind of validation the numbers hadn’t yet provided. This kind of spontaneous, unpaid exposure would become a pattern of viral, unscripted visibility that defined Whoop’s rise over the next decade.

5 More Smart Business Stories:

As you grow, you need a cap table management platform that you can trust to keep up. 

From issuing grants to 409A valuations or ASC 718 reporting, Pulley gives you the tools to manage equity. Experience a platform built for you: transparent, reliable, and designed to put your company first.

Learn why companies choose Pulley