For Will Ahmed, the road to building a $10.1 billion fitness startup began with what he calls “the ultimate betrayal.” The perpetrator? His own body.
Launched in 2012, the Boston-based fitness wearables company now has more than 2.7 million users across the globe. Those customers use Whoop’s screen-free wrist devices to track a wide range of biometric data around the clock, from sleep quality to how their bodies perform during exercise and recovery. The company achieved its 11-figure valuation in March, with a $575 million fundraising round from a group of investors including athletes like LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo and Rory McIlroy.
“My whole life, I loved sports and exercise,” says Ahmed, 36, Whoop’s founder and CEO. He played several sports growing up and eventually captained Harvard University’s prestigious squash squad. He also obsessed over fitness to the point of chronic fatigue from “over-training,” he says: “I would go through periods of getting fitter and fitter, and then somewhat suddenly feeling completely run down … and not knowing why.”
While studying government and economics at Harvard, Ahmed pored over hundreds of medical research papers for insight, he says. He found that fatigue from over-training can affect anyone who exercises frequently, not just high-level athletes. And he became convinced of an underserved market for active, health-conscious consumers who wanted a better understanding of “what’s going on, physiologically, inside this person’s body,” he says.
DON’T MISS: The communication skill that can help you accelerate your career growth
Before graduating in 2012, he published his own research paper on the subject, “The Feedback Tool: Measuring Intensity, Recovery, and Sleep,” and started working on Whoop. Working in the Harvard Innovation Labs with co-founders and fellow students John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae, Ahmed wrote his first business plan and developed early prototypes with physiological sensors.
The ensuing years didn’t exactly go smoothly. Investors repeatedly expressed skepticism about the business, and Whoop nearly went bankrupt roughly six years in, says Ahmed.
“I had never started a company. I never had a full-time job,” Ahmed says. “I was building a business at the intersection of hardware and software and data science and medicine, [but] I wasn’t a hardware engineer or computer scientist, or a data scientist or doctor. So, I think there was a lot of skepticism.”
‘A very challenging’ startup launch
Ahmed funded Whoop’s early days through an undisclosed amount of money from friends and family, he says. He spent most of 2012 trying — unsuccessfully — to woo larger investors, receiving 143 rejections in total during the company’s early years, he estimates.
Nike had just launched its FuelBand activity and calorie tracking wearable device in January 2012. The long-rumored Apple Watch followed two years later. “[Having] two of the best and biggest companies in the world, with Nike and Apple, as competitors is never good,” says Ahmed.
Investors suggested switching to building software for other companies’ wearables, but Ahmed was convinced that the surest route to long-term success was to build “the whole end-to-end system,” including both the hardware and the software that’d power it, he says.
“It was a very challenging time … every day I’d just try to pick myself up and put one foot in front of the other and keep building,” says Ahmed.
Source: Whoop
For him, Whoop’s differentiating feature would be a wide range of biometric data — including, eventually, blood pressure and ECG monitoring of your heart’s electrical activity — that was, at the time, mostly available through large, invasive equipment at medical centers. To gather that data, he had to build wearables that could successfully collect it. Eventually, that pitch helped Ahmed land $3 million in seed funding in July 2013 from a group of venture capital investors led by Collaborative Fund.
With funding in hand, Whoop could finally go about turning Ahmed’s ambitious obsession into a tangible product. Whoop’s co-founders spearheaded the computer science and mechanical engineering elements, with Nicolae becoming chief hardware engineer.
The company started by developing each individual technological component — like LED sensors that used light to measure heart activity and blood flow non-invasively, for example — and then worked to fit them together into a wristband. Its first product hit the market in September 2015.
From near-bankruptcy to ‘a real business’
Whoop initially courted a demographic of top athletes, hoping high-profile endorsements would give the brand instant cache. Ahmed got to them through their personal trainers and performance coaches, he told the “How I Built This” podcast in a July 2025 episode. By September 2015, Whoop users included NBA superstar LeBron James and swimming legend Michael Phelps.
But famous customers didn’t translate into reliable sales, says Ahmed. By 2017, Whoop still wasn’t profitable, and at one point that year, the company was “a week away from declaring bankruptcy,” he says, adding: “The technology was very powerful, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to make a real business out of it.”
Professional athletes might pay $500 for a fitness band, but a wider demographic wouldn’t, and Whoop needed a higher volume of sales revenue to cover its research and development costs, says Ahmed. In 2018, Whoop changed its business model to an annual membership package that starts at $199 per year. Members get their fitness band and access to Whoop’s app, which includes a suite of health and fitness tracking tools, plus free software and hardware updates when they roll out.
Whoop’s subscriber base grew, first steadily and then more sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic when consumers’ interest in tracking their personal health surged, the company told CNBC in October 2020. The company finished 2025 cash-flow positive after new memberships doubled on the year, Whoop announced on March 31.
Whoop founder and CEO Will Ahmed chats with NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes.Source: Whoop
But the fitness wearables market is no less competitive now than it was in 2012, and it’s still dominated by products like the Apple Watch — which sold an estimated 281 million devices over its first decade, Wired reported in April 2025. There’s also Fitbit, which Google acquired for $2.1 billion in 2019, and rival health tracking startups like Oura, which was most recently valued at $11 billion in October.
Ahmed plans to further grow Whoop’s subscriber base by adding more customers overseas — its members currently live across 200 countries — and investing further in technological development, including artificial intelligence, he says. Launching Whoop right out of college as “one of the scariest decisions I made in my life, because I didn’t know what I had just signed up for,” he says.
Other entrepreneurs should follow suit and trust their guts, he adds. “It was a huge leap of faith,” says Ahmed. “The lesson I’ve taken [is] sometimes you do have to take a huge leap … if that’s what your inner voice is telling you is right for you. For me, at least, that inner voice that I had as a 22-year-old was screaming: ‘You got to build this company.’”
Want to get ahead at work? Then you need to learn how to make effective small talk. In CNBC’s new online course, How To Talk To People At Work, expert instructors share practical strategies to help you use everyday conversations to gain visibility, build meaningful relationships and accelerate your career growth. Sign up today!
VIDEO09:15How I built a $1.4 million/month AI app at age 18How I Made It
About The Author
