At a $10.1 Billion Valuation, Whoop Turns to Women

In a campaign styled by a former Prada art director, stainless steel spun into Milanese mesh wraps around the wrists of Salima Boufelfel, co-founder of the fashion boutique Desert Vintage and Sofia Zevi, a gallerist. But the women, alongside three Parisian artisans — a jewellery designer, a chef and floral artist — are not promoting a luxury label.

It’s an ad for Whoop, the US tech wearables brand worn by pro athletes, and founded by Will Ahmed, a former Harvard squash player.

“We’ve always been inspired by jewelry,” said Ahmed. “If you’re building technology that’s worn on someone’s wrist, you have to be looking at high-end jewelry and watch brands.”

The campaign is to herald the Whoop Meridian, the company’s newest band design, which it hopes will cater to its growing female customer base and attract shoppers who haven’t embraced its wearables for style reasons. (Ahmed said women have “a higher bar for what they want to wear on their wrist,” and that Meridian had been three years in the making.) In March, Whoop closed a Series G fundraiser valuing it at $10.1 billion; it has raised $975 million to date from investors including the Mayo Clinic, and anticipates an initial public offering in the next 18 months.

With the launch, the Boston-based company is hoping to solve the ultimate hurdle to global ubiquity all wearables firms face: making its wares appeal more broadly to those not obsessive about fitness. Particularly women, who haven’t yet fully bought in as wholeheartedly to the biohacking and longevity movements that have helped the accessories proliferate.

In addition to the more fashion-forward strap, the company has hired Kyle Leahy, the former chief executive of Millennial cosmetics line Glossier as chief commercial officer, and José Cabaço, who previously held leadership roles at Nike, Adidas and Prada Linea Rossa. It has also added more detailed features around period tracking, conception and other women’s health concerns. Priced at $149 and launching on Thursday, the Whoop Meridian is available in gold, silver, black and rose gold hues, with a unisex design: Ahmed said customers of all genders have been looking for an option more appropriate for evening events. (Customers will also need a Whoop membership and tracking sensor to view their data in the app, starting at $199 per year.)

It competes with the likes of Oura, which makes a health tracking ring and filed for an IPO in May after securing an $11 billion valuation, Apple, which has the largest share of the wearables market, estimated around 21 percent for its Apple Watch, as well as Google-owned Fitbit, Garmin and other challengers.

As beloved as they are by athletes, trackers as a concept are often seen as incongruent with a chic outfit. Historical effects to make wearables fashionable are numerous: a Fitbit and Tory Burch bracelet from the 2010s; Diane von Furstenberg’s promotional turn for Google Glass; and Intel’s 2014 offering with Opening Ceremony have all been discontinued. Even Nike, with proven authority in apparel and sports, couldn’t make its wearables work.

Whoop declined to share its current customer gender split, but said it has more than doubled its female member base last year. As wellness becomes more entrenched in the lives of everyday people, its addressable market is growing. But convincing people who don’t partake in competitive exercise to wear a tracker round the clock is still tricky. Few wearers want a reminder of how little they may have moved in a day, and if users don’t derive value from the insights provided, they’ll likely stop wearing them.

“We’re empowering people to be the best versions of themselves,” said Leahy. “[Whoop] allows you to have expression and individuality, which puts it squarely at the intersection of wellness, beauty, lifestyle and fashion.”

Cultural Capital

Founded in 2012 by Ahmed, Whoop’s core offering is a wellness tracker that is worn around the clock, measuring biomarkers like heart rate variability, and providing feedback on athletic performance, sleep quality and overall wellness. Originally designed for elite athletes, and backed by the likes of LeBron James and Cristiano Ronaldo, the brand has shifted its focus from performance athletes to what it calls the “performant human,” an individual with an active lifestyle and high standards to match.

Whoop is expanding fast. The business is subscription-based, with its member base swelling to 3.2 million in 2026, up from 2 million last year. The company declined to give a revenue figure, but said it generated a bookings run rate of $1.1 billion and that it was cash flow positive in 2025. Whoop started the year with just over 800 employees and expects to end the year with around 1,400. (The company declined to say whether it would be cash flow positive following the hires.)

Daniel-Yaw Miller, a sports and fashion writer who pens the SportsVerse newsletter, described Whoop as the wearable of choice for athletes. He said Oura, which also makes a screenless wearable, is more of a lifestyle purchase. “Whoop is an everyday companion for [athletes’] sporting endeavours,” he said.

To maintain pace, Whoop needs to expand its customer base to more casual sportspeople — or just busy individuals. Leahy cited working mothers, or women with high-intensity jobs as a focus; that the campaign features working women with their own businesses is no accident. (Two men, the athletes Virgil Van Dijk and Antoine Dupont, also feature.)

That means making Whoop more visible in non-fitness circles, and making its device palatable to those with a higher watermark for style. It’s making other strides towards this: in January, Whoop announced a partnership with British designer Samuel Ross for an ongoing collaboration offering techwear-inspired apparel and device bands.

Until now, strap options have included silicone, woven fabric and leather in a myriad of colourways and patterns. Oura made a similar appeal to the world of style with the launch of its ceramic ring in Oct. 2025, available in four hues. (It previously offered a ring designed in partnership with Gucci.)

“One [strategy] was making the product cool, and the other was making the product invisible,” said Ahmed. Attracting female customers isn’t just about swelling its user base now. To create a more enduring brand, it needs to connect with modern lifestyle culture, which women largely rule. Leahy said it chose to shoot the campaign in Paris and Milan, two of the world’s biggest fashion and art cultural capitals, to underscore this positioning.

Miller said Whoop doesn’t need to be fashionable per se to reach this goal.

“But they need to make it a bit more sleek, wearable, and less visible,” he said.

The Road to IPO

Aside from carving out a new space in culture, the company has also been growing its geographic and demographic footprint. In the last three years, it has shifted from having a primarily US customer base to finding almost 60 percent of its memberships overseas: Women over 60 and customers under 20 are its fastest-growing segments, and it is now available in more than 200 countries.

It has also beefed up its wholesale presence; one can shop Whoop in retailers as disparate as the UK drugstore chain Boots and the Spanish department store El Corte Inglés.

With Meridian, the company is hoping to take a more decisive step into the mainstream. Amongst devotees, the device is indispensable: Ahmed and Leahy said many customers’ first task of the day is to look at their Whoop app, and on average, check it eight times a day. Still, the expansion arrives at an interesting juncture in consumer culture. While many shoppers are preoccupied with the idea of wellness, expressions like “biohacking” or “sleepmaxxing” are fast becoming part of normal health parlance as consumers look to improve their bodies and routines. They’re also pushing back against the omnipresence of technology in their lives, ditching their smartphones or rejecting the use of artificial intelligence.

Whoop believes there is a happy medium: Ahmed said he was aware many consumers feel overwhelmed by modern technology, that he had “love” for the analogue movement, noting that the screenless tracker’s notifications can be easily disabled.

Miller argued that modern women’s daily lives are high-intensity enough to qualify as daily athletic training. “[Wellness] has been focused on men for so long, there’s a lack of understanding of what women’s bodies go through,” he said.

But changing consumer behaviour is always hard to effect, and competition will remain stiff, especially for the women’s market: Oura has offered similar women’s health tracking since 2022, while Apple’s ubiquity in consumer technology makes it somewhat insurpassable.

Ahmed is sanguine about the competition, and confident that with a raft of new hires and an improved product offering, it can stand out from the competition.

“[Wearables] is a very difficult market, and it requires a number of different areas where you have to be great, not just good,” said Ahmed.

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Disclosure: Daniel-Yaw Miller previously worked for The Business of Fashion.