Building the Infrastructure for Preventive, Personalized Health with WHOOP

Why We're Investing in WHOOP

We are proud to announce that Define Ventures has invested in WHOOP, the human performance company using AI to personalize wellness and longevity. Since launching out of the Harvard Innovation Lab in 2012, WHOOP has built one of the most widely adopted continuous health-monitoring platforms in the world: a screenless, wrist-worn device that measures strain, recovery, and sleep around the clock, paired with WHOOP Coach, a generative-AI layer that turns physiological signal into daily guidance.

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WHOOP has millions of members worldwide, spanning professional athletes, military and first-responder units, Fortune 500 executives, and everyday consumers. The company is now evolving and expanding toward healthcare, which is one reason we're excited to partner. WHOOP Advanced Labs, launched in September 2025, has already drawn more than 350,000 waitlist sign-ups, and the company's FDA-cleared ECG (Heart Screener) detects signs of atrial fibrillation and shares results directly with a healthcare provider. Partnerships extend that reach: Datavant links de-identified WHOOP data to real-world healthcare datasets for outcomes research, and the Healthspan feature, built with Dr. Eric Verdin of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, estimates biological age and pace of aging. WHOOP has already built the member base, daily engagement, and data stream most healthcare applications spend years creating; the opportunity now is turning those assets into healthcare outcomes.

The Mismatch: Consumer Expectations vs. Patient Experience

A decade of wearables, telehealth, and direct-to-consumer diagnostics has taught everyday consumers, not just early biohackers, to expect continuous insight into their bodies: personalized feedback on sleep, stress, training load, and recovery, not a step count or a once-a-year snapshot. Traditional health providers, built around episodic, fee-for-service visits, aren't structured to meet that expectation. A primary care visit lasts fifteen minutes, once or twice a year; the rest of a patient's physiological life goes unmeasured.

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The gap matters most where the stakes are highest: chronic disease accounts for roughly 75% of U.S. healthcare spending each year, and nearly half of Americans live with at least one chronic condition; heart disease and stroke alone account for 30% of U.S. deaths. More continuous insight into day-to-day health has the opportunity to impact outcomes at scale, and WHOOP already gathers HRV, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and sleep staging, plus on-demand ECG and blood pressure insights. The opportunity is turning that daily stream into an early warning system, not a once-a-year snapshot.

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"WHOOP has been a leader in consumer wearables for over a decade, building a product and a dataset that remain unrivaled in the space. We're investing against exciting macro tailwinds, as more consumers take a proactive, daily approach to their own health and integrate it with AI, and we see a clear opportunity for WHOOP to expand that leadership into a much broader set of healthcare use cases."

WHOOP's Solution: A Continuous Health Operating System

WHOOP's platform starts with the wrist and expands outward. The WHOOP 5.0 and WHOOP MG devices continuously track biometric data without a screen, avoiding the passive-scrolling problem common to other wearables. Advanced Labs extends that into lab-grade blood diagnostics: members can upload existing bloodwork for free or book a curated panel across 65 biomarkers through Quest Diagnostics, reviewed by a clinician. Early data has already surfaced signs of metabolic dysfunction in 22% of participating members and cardiometabolic risk factors in nearly 30%.

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What sets WHOOP apart:

• Continuous monitoring that never has to stop - a 14 day battery life is amplified by a wireless PowerPack to charge the device while it's worn, so monitoring never stops; most competing wearables must come off the body to charge.
• The wrist is the highest-leverage form factor in consumer health - one of the few places people tolerate wearing something daily, giving WHOOP a sensor platform it can keep extending (ECG, blood pressure, blood biomarkers) without a new device or habit.
• A proven, highly engaged membership base - millions of paying members with daily engagement habits most health products spend years building, giving WHOOP a built-in distribution channel for every new healthcare offering.
• A multi-modal data asset no single-point solution can replicate - continuous wearable signal fused with periodic lab-grade blood biomarkers through Advanced Labs gives WHOOP a breadth of longitudinal data few preventive-health platforms can match.

Why Now and Why This Team?

The wearable fitness tracker market is projected to reach roughly $83 billion in 2026, growing at a 16%+ CAGR, and that growth is no longer coming from step counts. It's coming from consumers shifting from "how active was I today" to "what's happening inside my body, and what should I do about it" - the convergence that gets us excited about WHOOP right now.

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Will Ahmed founded WHOOP as a Harvard undergraduate after his own experience overtraining as a varsity squash captain, building the company's first prototypes with co-founders John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae at the Harvard Innovation Lab. What started as a tool for elite athletes (early sponsors include LeBron James, Michael Phelps, and Cristiano Ronaldo) has scaled into a platform trusted by millions, with the opportunity to serve millions more.

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We also believe Define is the right partner for WHOOP at this moment: as a venture firm built exclusively around healthcare, we bring health system, payer, and life sciences relationships that can help WHOOP navigate the clinical, regulatory, and reimbursement questions of becoming a preventive-medicine platform.

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Looking Ahead

WHOOP is positioned to become the infrastructure underneath preventive healthcare. We couldn't be more excited to partner with Will and the entire WHOOP team as they redefine what it means to own your own health. To learn more about WHOOP, please visit www.whoop.com.

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