60 billion, Cristiano Ronaldo invests in a unicorn

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THECAPITAL

The hundred-billion-dollar unicorn without a dial

This article is 4,178 Chinese characters, about 5.9 minutes to read

By | Lü Jingzhi Editor | Wu Ren

Source | #Rongzhong Finance

(ID: thecapital)

Wearable devices have just pulled off a super unicorn.

Recently, WHOOP announced that it has completed a $575 million Series G round, valuing the company at $10.1 billion—nearly three times the $3.6 billion valuation from its previous round in 2021. The roster of institutions involved in this round is already impressive enough, with Qatar Investment Authority, Mubadala, Abbott, and the Mayo Clinic all participating. But what truly made this financing go viral was a different list: nine top athletes from multiple sports—including football, basketball, and golf—participating as individual investors, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Rory McIlroy, Virgil van Dijk, and others. They are not brand ambassadors; before taking equity they were long-time WHOOP users.

Founded by Will Ahmed in 2012 in Harvard’s innovation lab, WHOOP’s core product is a wristband without a dial—designed to do one thing only: collect 24-hour heart rate variability, sleep quality, exercise strain, and recovery scores, then tell users whether their bodies are better suited for pushing hard today or for taking a rest. This extremely restrained product positioning helped WHOOP build genuine word-of-mouth within the athlete community, and also carved out a path completely different from Apple Watch. The subscription model, accumulation of 24 billion hours of physiological data, and FDA-certified medical-grade electrocardiogram monitoring all support the valuation logic of $10.1 billion.

C罗 invests, valuation triples

Another super unicorn has appeared.

Recently, WHOOP officially announced the completion of a $575 million Series G round, with its valuation set at $10.1 billion. What does this number mean? In 2021, when WHOOP completed its previous financing round, its valuation was $3.6 billion. In under five years, the valuation has nearly tripled.

The lead investor is Collaborative Fund. The institutional lineup spans sovereign funds, medical institutions, and traditional venture capital: Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Mubadala Investment Company, Abbott, Mayo Clinic, Glade Brook, and other long-established institutions.

But what truly sparked outside discussion this round is the list of individual investors: Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Rory McIlroy, Reggie Miller, Virgil van Dijk, Matthieu Van der Poel, Shane Lowry, plus Irish singer Niall Horan and Dubai influencer Karen Wazen—nine elite athletes and public figures from different sports including football, basketball, golf, and cycling, appearing on the same financing document.

This is not the first time WHOOP has pulled top athletes into its shareholder roster, but this time the density and name recognition have clearly moved up a level. In a statement, C罗 directly said: “WHOOP has become one of the most important tools I use to support my long-term health. No other company has created such a powerful health platform—and one that people actually want to wear.” Behind this line is a detail worth noting: Ronaldo was already a long-time WHOOP user prior to this, and he also signed a wearable technology cooperation agreement with the club Napoli—when he took equity, he had already been using the product for quite a while.

This is the core difference between WHOOP’s slate of individual investors and traditional sports endorsements: they are not image ambassadors who are approached by a brand to film ads. Instead, they become users first, then turn into shareholders. This path forms a word-of-mouth transmission mechanism among top athletes’ circles: your trusted athlete uses it—then he also puts money into it. For target users who also care about physical performance, this is more persuasive than any advertising.

WHOOP was founded by Will Ahmed in 2012 in Boston. Its product core is a wristband without a dial. No time display, no notifications—just one thing: continuously collect physiological data around the clock, such as heart rate variability (HRV), sleep quality, exercise strain, and recovery scores, and tell users whether their body today is suitable for high-intensity training or needs rest. This design trade-off itself is a positioning statement: WHOOP is not consumer electronics; it does not compete for users with Apple Watch. It serves those who take body data seriously and are willing to pay a $239 annual subscription fee for it—high-intensity sports people.

This subscription-based business model has generated fairly clear numbers so far: 2025 full-year bookings run-rate reached $1.1 billion, doubling year over year; global members exceeded 2.5 million; product shipments cover 56 countries. Founder Ahmed, in interviews, particularly emphasized measuring the business with bookings instead of revenue. The reason is that the company simultaneously operates hardware shipments and subscription renewals, and bookings can more accurately reflect the dynamics of cash flow. As of this round, WHOOP’s total historical fundraising has exceeded $900 million.

From Harvard team captain to a Silicon Valley unicorn

In 2012, Will Ahmed was still the captain of Harvard’s wall ball team, majoring in government—not an engineer, not a doctor, and he had not studied computer science. But he had a problem that plagued him throughout his entire college career: why every season he would go through the same cycle—training harder and getting stronger—then suddenly collapse, completely unaware of what was happening to his body.

He began systematically reviewing the literature. He read more than 500 medical papers, and finally wrote one himself about “how to continuously monitor human physiological status.” Later, this paper became WHOOP’s business plan. When Ahmed looked back on this experience, he said he never thought about starting a company during his undergraduate years. It was just one thing after another—he became more and more obsessed with the proposition of “continuous monitoring of the human body,” until he couldn’t break free. In 2012, at age 22, he formally founded WHOOP in Harvard’s innovation lab. The co-founders were John Capodilupo, a computer science student at Harvard, and Aurelian Nicolae, a hardware engineer—two people he knew on campus whose technical directions happened to complement his.

In the early days, entrepreneurship was far from as smooth as it looks now. Ahmed sent financing offers to 143 investors, and all were rejected. The reasons were highly consistent: don’t build hardware; license existing devices; just focus on the algorithms. Ahmed didn’t listen. His judgment was that if the precision of body-data collection wasn’t good enough, no matter how good the algorithms were, there would be nothing to work with. To create truly valuable health data, you had to control the sensors and hardware yourself. This was a contrarian decision at the time, but later it became WHOOP’s core moat—one that’s hardest to replicate. For a considerable period after the company was founded, it only had three months of cash reserves. In the most dangerous moment, it was just two days away from filing for bankruptcy.

The real turning point came from a channel that Ahmed himself hadn’t anticipated.

The first version of the product was officially released in 2015. Ahmed decided not to go into the mass consumer market first, but to enter the professional athlete circle. His strategy was to bypass the athletes themselves and go directly to their personal coaches, because coaches are more willing to try new tools. And if the product really works, they naturally recommend it to the athletes. That’s how James and Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps became among WHOOP’s earliest users, all within the first hundred account numbers. One day, Ahmed was inadvertently flipping through TV when he saw a KIA car advertisement. In a quick shot, it showed WHOOP on James’s wrist. In that moment, he realized things were starting to change. WHOOP didn’t pay James to be a spokesperson—James was wearing it on his own. That detail began spreading by word of mouth in the top athlete community. McIlroy, van Dijk, Tiger Woods, Sabalenka… more and more professional athletes appeared on the username roster—not because of ads, but because of peer recommendations.

Later, Ahmed summarized this strategy in one line: “If we can get the very top athletes to truly get value from WHOOP, then we can build a complete brand around ‘performance’.” He admitted that at the time he didn’t fully recognize another layer of upside to this strategy: top athletes are a group that may be small in scale, but extremely willing to tolerate early imperfections in the product because they are so eager for the promise. The usage feedback from these early users helped WHOOP refine the product round after round, and it also bought WHOOP a window of time to prove its business model to investors.

Once WHOOP took hold in the athlete community, it began expanding to a wider user base. The U.S. Navy Special Forces became an enterprise customer; the NFL players association and Major League Baseball in the U.S. signed cooperation agreements with WHOOP in succession. These endorsements further strengthened WHOOP’s brand recognition among “serious users”—not something for ordinary people to track steps, but a tool used by professionals to manage their bodies. Based on this positioning, WHOOP launched the WHOOP Unite product line for enterprises and institutions, serving audiences extending from sports teams to corporate teams, government agencies, and military units.

From the first-generation prototype machine assembled by three people out of Harvard’s innovation lab, to a global platform covering 56 countries, more than 2.5 million members, and an annualized bookings run-rate of $1.1 billion—Ahmed took thirteen years to build it. During this period, WHOOP completed seven rounds of fundraising, with valuation rising from zero to $10.1 billion. People like C罗 and James moved from being the initial users to becoming investors in this round. This identity shift, by itself, is the most direct footnote to those thirteen years.

Smart wearables—where is the next trillion-dollar track

Placing the timing of WHOOP’s completion of this financing round into the broader wearable device industry makes it clear it isn’t an isolated event.

Half a year ago, Finland smart ring company Oura completed a $900 million round, valuing it at $11 billion. The two companies both reached over $10 billion valuations in nearly the same period, pointing to the same judgment: the story of smart wearables has only just been told halfway. The global wearable devices market is currently about $70 billion, and is expected to exceed $150 billion by 2030. But that figure alone doesn’t explain much; more worth attention is the change in market structure. Over the past decade, the main incremental growth in this space came from the mass consumer side. Apple, Samsung, and Huawei captured the vast majority of users through smartwatches. The next increment is shifting from “feature stacking” to “data depth”—from selling hardware to selling health services. This shift is the underlying logic that allows valuations for companies like WHOOP and Oura to hold up.

Apple’s position in this space is often used as a reference point for WHOOP, but in reality the two companies aren’t competing on the same track. The core user needs for Apple Watch are notifications, payments, and map navigation, while health tracking is an add-on. With WHOOP, users are buying health data itself; the device has no other functions. This difference means the user stickiness of the two product types is completely different. For Apple Watch users, the driver to upgrade to a new model is that the processor is faster and the screen is nicer. For WHOOP users, the driver to renew is that they’ve accumulated months or even years of personal baseline health data on this platform. Replacing it means losing the reference value of that data. This data accumulation creates switching costs that are WHOOP’s true moat—not sensor precision and not algorithms.

The value of data has been further amplified after AI’s involvement. WHOOP has already accumulated more than 24 billion hours of human physiological monitoring data. In global peers, that number is nearly unmatched. When AI models need real, high-frequency, long-period human data to train personalized health prediction models, whoever holds that database has the credentials to enter the next round of competition. Ahmed has mentioned in multiple settings that WHOOP’s long-term goal is to become a “personal health operating system”—meaning it wouldn’t only tell users what their recovery score is today, but should provide genuinely personalized health intervention recommendations based on personal historical data. The prerequisites for making that goal real are exactly the amount of data and its quality—what WHOOP has been doing for the past thirteen years.

Medicalization is another path opening up in this track. The wearable device industry moving from “fitness tools” to “medical devices” isn’t a new topic, but companies that have truly crossed regulatory thresholds are still few so far. WHOOP MG obtaining FDA certification for medical-grade ECG and blood pressure monitoring is a concrete step forward in this direction. The pricing logic of medical devices is completely different from that of consumer electronics. Once wearable data can enter clinical decision workflows and be included in insurance reimbursement systems, the ceiling of the entire business model will be redefined. Abbott’s and Mayo Clinic’s equity investments—if you frame it as “financial investment”—may be less accurate than saying they helped secure a key node along the way. Abbott has already proven the commercial viability of medical-grade wearables in the continuous glucose monitoring device field. Mayo Clinic’s clinical endorsement can help WHOOP connect the verification and validation process across the medical system. With these two institutions stepping in, it means WHOOP on the path to medicalization isn’t fumbling through the dark on its own.

The logic of geographic expansion runs in parallel with medicalization—two lines with different directions, but both expanding WHOOP’s market boundaries. At present, WHOOP’s main user base is concentrated in North America. Europe and Asia-Pacific are already starting to penetrate but are far from saturated. The Middle East is a new battlefield that this financing round places particular bets on. High-net-worth populations are dense there, health awareness is awakening quickly, and there’s willingness at the government level to proactively drive digital health infrastructure. These conditions align across the Gulf region—which is the logic behind building a research lab in Doha and signing with Al Nasr Club for WHOOP. Ahmed has clearly stated that the IPO goal is to be realized within 12 to 24 months. Progress on global expansion will directly affect whether the valuation narrative can hold by then.

Looking at a longer timeline, the smart wearable track is undergoing a qualitative transformation—from tool to platform. The first generation of wearables solved the problem of “recording”: telling users what happened. The second generation solved “analysis”: telling users what the data means. The real opportunity is in the third generation—“actionable recommendations” based on personal data—so the device can truly influence users’ daily decision-making. This evolution requires not better sensors, but a sufficiently long accumulation of data, a sufficiently deep iteration of algorithms, and sufficiently strong user trust. The C罗s are willing to put money in, and what they’re betting on is exactly that.

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