Globe reporter Janelle Nanos sits down with leaders in the city’s business community to talk about their career paths, work and accomplishments, as well as their vision for Boston’s future.
Will Ahmed is on a mission to unlock human performance.
The 34-year-old chief executive and founder of fitness technology firm Whoop has built the Boston-based company into a $3.6 billion brand, with celebrity investors like Michael Phelps, LeBron James, and Cristiano Ronaldo. The company opened a flashy new headquarters last year in Kenmore Square, where its massive logo now hovers just under the Citgo sign. It’s a remarkable degree of success for a fitness tracker that doesn’t measure steps or even tell you the time.
But for Ahmed, that’s the point.
“There are physiological metrics inside your body that you can measure to really know what the status of your body is,” he said. “That’s what Whoop is constantly surfacing.”
In the latest installment of the Globe’s Bold Types video series, Ahmed sat down with business reporter Janelle Nanos to discuss Whoop’s appeal with elite athletes, what sets Whoop apart from other fitness trackers, and why the company is particularly well-situated to take advantage of Boston’s health care and technology expertise, not to mention its rabid sports fanaticism.
Explore the full Bold Types series
Whoop is not like other fitness trackers, Ahmed says, because it’s designed as a “sophisticated tool to help consumers understand their bodies,” in ways he says the competition does not.
The device, which can typically be worn on a wrist or tucked into Whoop-designed athletic gear, measures inputs like heart rate variability, stress levels, and respiratory rate to help users get a sense of their ongoing strain, recovery, and sleep. These metrics are combined each day into an individualized daily score, which helps a user understand how well their body is performing, and how hard they should work out that day as they push toward peak fitness.
Coupled with a new AI-enabled tool within its app, the Whoop becomes a system, Ahmed says, that offers more calibrated insights into a users’ health and fitness goals. And with the company’s subscription model, users pay about $30 a month to access that data.
“When we started the company we set out to replace a lot of medical technology, not become a pedometer,” Ahmed said. “And so when you’re getting insights from Whoop they’re very accurate, they’re very precise, and as a consequence they’re more insightful. … It’s measuring things inside your body that you can’t feel.”
I wore the Whoop strap. Here’s what I learned.
Ahmed began developing Whoop while at Harvard, where, as the captain of the squash team, he struggled to understand how his daily workouts were impacting his overall performance.
“I was a college athlete, training three or four hours a day at Harvard, and having no idea what that meant. The solution to that became a process of research and investigation.” He began reading medical journals and working on the company out of the Harvard Innovation Labs in 2012.
Since that start, Ahmed has raised nearly $405 million in venture capital from the likes of Softbanks’s Vision Fund 2, Accomplice, and NextView Ventures. Last year, he doubled down on Whoop’s commitment to Boston by opening a new 121,000-square-foot office steps from Fenway Park and on the Boston Marathon route. Now, every time a ball heads toward the Green Monster, Red Sox fans get a view of the Whoop logo alongside the Citgo sign.
“We like the idea of Whoop being a landmark in the skyline,” Ahmed says, and being in Boston has been a benefit to the company’s performance too. “We’re at the intersection of an amazing hospital system, an unbelievable sports ecosystem, some of the best schools in the world, and an awesome tech market. The location of this office physically and also the community of Boston makes it a really successful place for Whoop to call home.”
There’s been talk about whether Whoop might position itself for an IPO, but for now, Ahmed says he’s focused on expanding his reach globally into markets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. And he intends to keep adding functionality to the bands, with more emphasis on metrics for women’s health, stress, and other medical issues.
“The Whoop vantage point is performance is health, health is performance,” he said. “There’s such a problem in society today to just focus on sick care, versus really understanding the body and putting humans in a position to help prevent something from going wrong.”
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