fitness trackers
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Whoop raises another $200M for its athlete-focused fitness wearable
Founded in 2012, Whoop is far from a household name in the world of fitness trackers. But over the years, the company has attracted its share of converts. It hasn’t had any issue attracting venture capital over the years, either. Last time we checked in on the Boston-based company was in late-2019, when it raised $55 million. Now it’s back with a massive $200 million raise.
The Series F round brings Whoop’s total funding to nearly $405 million — a pretty massive investment for a company of its size. The round, led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, puts the valuation at a jaw-dropping $3.6 billion valuation.
Additional investors include IVP, Cavu Venture Partners, Thursday Ventures, GP Bullhound, Accomplice, NextView Ventures and Animal Capital. They join a long list of former backers, including the National Football League Players Association, Jack Dorsey and a number of professional athletes.
The company’s targeting of athletes marks a strong contrast with leading consumer wearables like the Apple Watch and Fitbit. In fact, the company has a specific offering for sports teams, as well as solutions for businesses, healthcare and government/defense.
Whoop’s name made the rounds recently when Fitbit announced a “Daily Readiness Score” for the Charge 5, which many likened to the company’s more advanced analytics.
The company cites “rapid growth” in its membership offering over the past year as a motivation behind seeking additional funding. That was likely driven, in part, by the decision in 2019 to make the $500 wearable free, while focusing on a subscription service that starts at $18 a month for an 18-month membership (the shorter the membership, the more the monthly fee).
Whoop is eying international expansion beyond the U.S. and using the massive influx of cash on R&D for its hardware, software and analytics solutions. Money will also go toward expanding headcount, which is currently in excess of 500 (with nearly half of those employees having joined in the past year).
“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with SoftBank as we grow internationally,” founder and CEO Will Ahmed said in a release. “While we have experienced amazing growth in the past year, the potential of our technology and the vast market for health monitoring remains largely untapped.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Samsung’s got a new budget 5G handset and a fitness tracker with a two-week battery
Yesterday’s overflow Galaxy Unpacked event was about one thing and one thing alone: the Galaxy Z Fold 2. Honestly, it was a bit anticlimactic after its predecessor found Samsung unveiling five new devices. But the singular focus wasn’t for lack of new stuff to show off. In fact, the company just unleashed a whole slew of new products across a wide range of categories, including a gaming monitor, charging pad, refrigerator and washing machine.
There are two in particular I’d like to break out here, however: the new Galaxy Fit 2 band and A42 5G handset. The latter in particular is worth highlighting, given the company’s huge push into 5G this year. Samsung is betting big on pushing early and hard on the next-generation wireless tech.
Early this year, the company announced that it would be standardizing 5G across its flagship products. The company has also made a major push toward embracing the tech on its budget devices, including the A7 and now the A42. 5G hasn’t quite turned out to be the market correction the industry was banking on, due in no small part to a slowdown in sales from the pandemic. Certainly few banked on that. But while Apple has yet to announce a 5G iPhone (give it a month or two, mind), Samsung’s already loaded up.
And importantly, the A42 looks like it may be Samsung’s cheapest 5G offering (though we’re still waiting on exact pricing). Honestly, Samsung wasn’t particularly chatty about the device during an IFA-tied event. Though we do know there’s a quad-camera system and a 6.6-inch display. Honestly, one of the most remarkable things about 5G is how quickly affordable devices have hit the market, thanks in part to the efforts of component makers like Qualcomm .
Image Credits: Samsung
The Galaxy Fit 2 is notable mostly for the inclusion of a 15-day battery (per Samsung). It can autodetect five different kinds of workouts and monitors sleep. It’s nice to see Samsung still offering something up to the dwindling tracker market, even as its (and the world’s) focus has clearly shifted over to smartwatches.
Powered by WPeMatico
Whoop, the sports tech and analytics company that makes discreet wearables, raises $55M
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. “You’ll see Whoop over time worn throughout your body,” CEO Will Ahmed said. “The tech can live in other areas of the body, people will not even know you are wearing a sensor. We like the idea of tech being invisible while still being there.”
The funding brings the total to more than $100 million for the Boston-based company, and while Ahmed, who originally incubated the startup at Harvard with co-founders John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae, said the valuation was not being disclosed, he did describe it as “healthy” — which I guess is appropriate for a health-tech company.
For some context, PitchBook notes that its last round of $25 million, in 2018, was at $125 million, post-money. That would mean a minimum of $180 million here, although the “healthy” implies it is actually higher. (We’ll continue to dig around and will update the number if we learn more.)
Whoop doesn’t disclose how many users it has currently, or 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 product not just to the mass market, but to an elite group of sports people — who in turn are not just major athletes, but, in this day and age, major influencers when it comes to purchasing power.
This latest round was led by Foundry Group — coincidentally also an investor in Fitbit — with participation from Two Sigma Ventures, Accomplice, Thursday Ventures, Promus Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. 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 backers of the company include the Durant Company, the National Football League Players Association, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey, 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 taken a very different turn, opting to build a device that looks nothing like a piece of electronics, even if behind the scenes it’s using just as much AI and other powerful technology to crunch the data that its five sensors are continuously collecting.
“The dirty secret with wearables is that the more features you try to pack in to them, the less effective they are,” Ahmed said. “We have been deliberate about what we want our tech to do. We think about the context of what will make the experience better, and if it doesn’t we’re not doing it.”
He gave me a flat “no comment” on the subject of whether Whoop had ever been approached for acquisition, but it’s notable to watch what has been happening around big tech. 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. And Google’s acquisition of Fitbit (if it clears all regulatory and other hurdles) is a big sign of how the company also sees this area as one where it will want to have a seat at the table.
“Google buying Fitbit is a sign that health data will be a big piece of the future for tech companies,” Ahmed said, pointing out that the company’s lack of growth in device sales is a strong sign that Google bought it largely for its data capabilities. “It puts a big value on data and what it’s done there and suggests Google will use the data to create health products.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Would the world be different if Neil Armstrong had worn a Fitbit wristband when he set foot on the moon? What if Nixon had been equipped with a cardiac sensor during Watergate?