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Let's switch gears though and talk about completely and talk about wearable health tech company Whoop. It's announced it raised five hundred and seventy five million dollars in a series G funding that values of the company at more than ten billion in total. And here to discuss the latest round is Will Ahmed, the CEO of Whoop. Will great to have you on a I'm a longtime Whoop wearer. I'm on a three hundred and ninety day streak right now, and it's nice to see your valuation up to more
than ten billion. That's around the same I noticed 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 you know, 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 found it been twenty twelve, so I've been building this company for fourteen years. There's been an enormous number of players in the space over the years. In the early days, you had you know, big wearable or big sports apparel brands excuse me, 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 five million wearables
were sold a year. Now that figure is three hundred to four hundred 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, you know, I'm obviously a customer, and so many people here around me are customers? Do they stay? Do we stay?
Are you?
Are you retaining customers? Those that have twelve month subscriptions, are they going to twenty four? Are they renewing?
Well, we recently actually launched three membership tiers. So it used to be sign up for two hundred and forty
dollars a year. Now there's a lower plan and a higher plan three hundred and sixty dollars 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 Woop has ECG monitoring with aphib detection. 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 overwhelming 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 back up eight times a day, which is pretty extraordinary user engagement.
We have an eighty three percent down mau 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.
You know, 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 know you can see whether you're in line for a stroker a heart attack. Is this a fitness company or is it like a clinical diagnostics tool.
Well, we want to build the most powerful personal health platform in the world, and we see that as an evolution from fitness and sports, which is our origins, to now working very broadly across health and medical capabilities. You know, two of our investors in this latest financing were Mayo
Clinic and Abbot. Mayo Clinic of course being one of the best health institutions in the entire world, and we're going to be announcing a lot of research with the Mayo Clinic, an Abbot of course being one of the best medical device makers in the world, and we're going to be announcing more with them as well. And so I think this overall financing really shows the past and the history of WHOOP with the athletes coming in Christiano Ronaldo, Ory McElroy now Lebron James as well as the future
of Whoop. With many of these health strategics, you.
Need to get some squash players, You need to sponsor some squash players here.
Well, we love squash. I've played squash my entire life. Ali Farrag, former World number one, is a good friend and a WOOP member, So we'll do more in squash.
You are cash flow positive, I mean, you're making money, so why raise this additional half a billion dollars plus now?
Well, we want to accelerate a lot of the work that we're doing. We think the opportunity to own health monitoring and integrate deeply into the healthcare system is now just completely up for grabs and there's only a few players in the market, and we really want to attack the opportunity. So we're going to be leaning in on
research and development. We've announced that we're hiring six hundred roles this year, really across every single function, so we're actually growing our headcount eighty percent, which seems to be a counter narrative move right now. And then we're also growing internationally, so we've brought in some really great strategic
investors from around the world. Sovereign wealth funds like Qia and two point zero and Mubadala and others, and we're going to be investing heavily in growth around the world.
How can you put AI to work? And I know you already have an AI assistant on your platform obviously I'm on there many times a day, But how much do you think it can be improved?
Well, I think ultimately Whoop will either make you healthier or it will save your life, and those are really the two areas of development for WHOOP, and as we think about coaching and alerting, those are the two areas that we're investing in. And so we do believe that AI, sitting on top of all of this data is going
to be able to deliver value in those categories. I think it's inevitable that a huge percentage of humanity will be continuously wearing a health monitor and it's going to make you healthier or it's going to save your life one day.
Will you go public before that? I mean, I think I read Series G right, We're getting pretty far along in the alphabet. When is the IPO plan for.
Well, we still see it on the horizon of eighteen to twenty four months. You know, Fortunately, whoops. Operating cash flow positive. We've just added five hundred and seventy five million to our balance sheet, so we've got a very strong balance sheet and it allows us to be I think, really thoughtful and control our destiny and root to IPO.
All right, Will, great having you on sett Thanks so much for joining us. Will. I'm d there, the CEO of we