Whoop CEO Will Ahmed Talks Funding, Potential IPO
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News. Let's switch gears, though, and talk about, completely, and talk about wearable health tech company Whoop. It's announced it raised $575 million in a Series G funding that values the company at more than $10 billion in total. And here to discuss the latest round is Will Ahmed, the CEO of Whoop. Will, great to have you on. I'm a I'm a long time whoop wearer. I'm on a 390 day streak right now. And it's nice to see your valuation up to more than 10 billion. That's around the same I notice as Aura. And so I'm wondering what you think about what must be your biggest competitor. I mean, is there room in this space for two powerful companies or is this a winner take all scenario?
Well, thanks for having me on, Matt, and thanks for being a longtime Whoop member. I appreciate that. You know, if I actually just look back over the last decade, because I founded Whoop in 2012, so I've been building this company for 14 years, there's been an enormous number of players in the space over the years. In the early days, you had big sports apparel brands, so you had the Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma crowd. You then had entries from the tech market, so you had Microsoft and Google and Intel and Amazon, Meta. And so there's been a lot of players, I would say broadly, in the wearable space. Today, there's actually maybe the fewest number of players that I've seen in the last five years, and yet the wearables market has grown enormously.
You know, when I first started the company, I think less than 5 million wearables were sold a year. Now that figure is 300 to 400 million devices a year and continues to grow. So we're very excited about where the company's positioned and we think we're still in the early days despite the maturity of the business.
So I'm obviously a customer and so many people here around me are customers. Do they stay? Do we stay? Are you retaining customers? Those that have 12-month subscriptions, are they going to 24? Are they renewing?
Well, we recently actually launched three membership tiers. So it used to be you can sign up for $240 a year. Now there's a lower plan and a higher plan, $360 a year for Whoop Life. And we've actually seen an overwhelming number of people migrate from our middle tier to our highest tier. And that demonstrates, I think, that our members are willing to pay for enhanced features, premium capabilities, an additional medical sensing portfolio that we've rolled out. So now WHOOP has ECG monitoring with AFib detection.
What recent funding did Whoop announce and what does it mean for the company?
We've come out with blood pressure insights, which were the first wearable to do. We recently launched advanced labs, which is blood testing. So overwhelmingly, we see our members wanting to invest more in their health with WHOOP. They're buying additional services. They're moving up in their membership tier. And then in addition to that, we have some of the best user engagement in all of health. Our members are opening the Whoop app eight times a day, which is pretty extraordinary user engagement. We have an 83% Dow-Mao ratio, which I believe is second only to WhatsApp in terms of how often people are using and engaging with the product. So it really speaks to, I think, the value that we've been able to create and the fact that our members are, in fact, improving their health.
I think about all this stuff that you can do, and I see the labs, myself as well, and the blood pressure monitoring. You can not predict, but you can see whether you're in line for a stroke or a heart attack. Is this a fitness company, or is it like a clinical diagnostics tool?
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