This morning Whoop, a Boston-based performance wearable company, raked in $55 million in a Series D funding round. The new money is a combination of both equity and debt. Foundry Group led the round with participation from Two Sigma Ventures, Accomplice, Thursday Ventures, Promus Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank and other individual investors.
According to the company, this latest raise brings its total funding to $100 million.
HOW IT WORKS
Whoop’s product includes a wearable strap that collects physiological data and a corresponding app, which gives users insights into their training and recovery.
Users have access to a Strain Coach, which shows participants their data related to their exertion level. It uses past data about how a person recovers to coach them on how far they should exert themselves during exercise in real-time.
The platform also displays the user information about their strain, heart rate and how calories evolve. The technology is also able to monitor a user’s sleep and provide data about these trends.
WHAT IT’S FOR
The $55 million will be put towards expanding consumer acquisitions, membership services and product development.
“We will continue to grow our membership globally and make Whoop the best experience for our members,” Will Ahmed, Whoop founder & CEO, said in a statement. “Human performance is a new category and Whoop has emerged as both the pioneer and the market leader.”
MARKET SNAPSHOT
While Whoop bills itself as a product for human performance geared towards athletes, there are plenty of wearables on the market tracking a variety of metrics.
In fact, major tech giants are now including more health features into their wearables. The Apple Watch 4 includes an atrial fibrillation-detecting algorithm and an ECG built in.
But perhaps the biggest wearable news in the last year happened earlier this month when Google acquired Fitbit for roughly $2.1 billion, or $7.35 per share, in cash. While there are still a lot of unknowns about what this will mean, a Google blog post did indicate that we can expect to see Google wearables in the future.
