WHOOP, the world’s most informative wearable, is launching a new $30 subscription service for the everyday consumer, so everyone can get the benefits of its activity monitoring and analytics tools.
It’s the wearable that professional athletes and other performance-minded alpha-people use to find out how to optimize their workouts, sleep and rest periods to be the best selves they can be.
For $30 per month with a six-month mandatory commitment, anyone can become a member of what chief executive Will Ahmed is calling the WHOOP community.
Indeed, along with the hardware and analytics, which will report on and suggest recovery periods, ideal workouts and the optimal amount of sleep a body needs culled from the five variables WHOOP’s wearable collects 100 times per second, WHOOP is creating a social network where users can create teams and participate in challenges to encourage activity and use.
“We’ve now taken many learnings from the top performers and applied them to a consumer facing membership,” said Ahmed in a statement. “This is for a wider set of consumers — those that take performance seriously, whether that means securing a [personal record] on their next marathon, or improving their personal habits as a business executive on the road for work.”
The $180 sticker price for a WHOOP and membership to the service represents a deep discount from its previous pricing structure.
WHOOP’s devices retail for a not-insignificant $500 for the wearable, with an extra nominal fee to switch out the default band for something with a bit more swag. With the new funding the company will look to accelerate its global expansion so WHOOP can dominate still-more sporting events, and become the new accessory that the high-powered quantified executive (or health-obsessed paranoiac) won’t want to live without.
Indeed, one of WHOOP’s selling points to potential new members is the insights that can be gleaned from its high-performance athletes.
The company has an amazing roster of customers among the elite of American sports. The wearable has been approved for universal in-game use in Major League Baseball, while also getting a partnership with the NFLPA to track recovery times among football players. WHOOP actually is selling data on player performance to other teams so they can see how they stack up against the competition. It’s also talking to NFL broadcasters about displaying WHOOP data during games.
An assortment of NBA players use the app, which could explain the involvement of Kevin Durant’s new investment fund and the appearance of David Stern among the individual investors (to date, the NBA is one of the leagues in the U.S. that WHOOP hasn’t been able to crack). But the Duke University men’s basketball team is using the company’s wearables (even though the Blue Devils suck).
In addition to the new membership service, WHOOP also said it added strategic investor Bose Ventures as a backer. Bose’s investment comes on the heels of the $25 million WHOOP secured in its last financing round earlier this year.
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