Tech
Whoop’s fitness band is cool. Can it stay cool as the company grows?
For the better part of a decade, Whoop sold itself as a secret weapon for serious athletes. LeBron James was convinced to slap on the company’s fitness band in Whoop’s first year. Michael Phelps came soon after. Other Whoop wearers include Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes, and Rory McIlroy. The message to the public? The world’s best performers track their bodies with this device, and you can, too.
It has worked. Whoop, the Boston-based health wearable company that Will Ahmed founded in his senior year at Harvard, now operates in more than 200 countries, and, according to Ahmed, grew revenue more than 100% last year, as well as reached cash-flow positive. The hardware — a band worn around the wrist, bicep, or torso — measures sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and a growing list of biomarkers. The subscription model, which bundles hardware and software for between $200 and $360 a year — the device itself included, with no separate purchase required— has proven remarkably sticky: 83% of monthly active users open the app on any given day, a ratio that Ahmed says trails only WhatsApp.
The next chapter is a harder sell.
Ahmed, 36, wants Whoop to be less of a performance tool and more of a life-saving one — a continuous health monitor that doesn’t just help you recover from a hard workout, but one day tells you, unprompted, that you’re about to have a heart attack and need to get to a hospital.
The company has already launched medically cleared features including ECG monitoring and atrial fibrillation detection — a capability that flags an irregular heartbeat that can lead to stroke — and what it calls blood pressure “insights,” which Ahmed says makes Whoop the first wearable to offer the feature.
The FDA challenged that last one in a warning letter last summer, arguing the feature constituted medical diagnosis rather than wellness monitoring; Whoop said the FDA was “overstepping its authority,” and kept building.
Today, a blood testing partnership with Quest Diagnostics — which has over 2,000 U.S. locations — lets members take a blood test and upload their biomarkers directly into the app, where a clinician reviews the results alongside their Whoop data. A feature called Health Span calculates your biological age. Ahmed says it has become the company’s most popular feature since its launch in May of last year.
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The device itself has no screen, no notifications, no step counter. The decision was strategic from the start. “If you have a screen, then you’re a watch,” he tells TechCrunch via a Zoom call. “And if you’re a watch, then you’re competing with a lot of other watches, because people will never wear two watches.”
Not only can Whoop be worn alongside whatever watch you already own, he suggests, it can be tucked away entirely, a sensor slipped into a bicep sleeve, a sports bra, or a pair of shorts, disappearing into your clothing. It’s probably safe to say the overwhelming majority of Whoop’s customers want to wear the band as a fashion statement, but when asked directly, Ahmed offers that the company’s apparel line, launched in 2021, grew 70% last year.
But Whoop isn’t alone in moving beyond its roots to wanting to pull everyone into the tent. Oura, the Finnish company behind the smart ring that has become Whoop’s most direct rival, has built a large and loyal following of its own — largely among the kind of high-performing professionals who approach their bodies with the same rigor they bring to their work.
Oura’s model works differently. Customers buy the ring outright for around $350, then pay roughly $70 a year to access the platform. When I spoke with Oura chief product officer Dorothy Kilroy last fall, she said retention at the 12-month mark was hitting the high 80s, a remarkable figure for any wearable, most of which quickly wind up in a drawer.
Both companies now say women are their fastest-growing segment, and last fall they announced blood-testing partnerships within one day of each other — a coincidence that neither side was eager to discuss.
Whoop’s numbers still reflect where it started. Though Ahmed is circumspect about sharing too many figures publicly, he says Whoop skews more male than female. He also says the business is now roughly evenly split between the U.S. and the rest of the world — a shift from just a few years ago. Whoop formally ships to 60 countries.
What has set Whoop apart, at least in its telling, is that its most famous users didn’t have to be persuaded. The Australian Open earlier this year instructed players including Carlos Alcaraz to remove their Whoop bands mid-tournament, despite the device having been approved by the International Tennis Federation. The players pushed back. Though Whoop has brand ambassadors — Aryna Sabalenka is one — others like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, both of whom wear Whoops under their wristbands, simply didn’t want to take them off.
“It created a whole set of media outrage,” Ahmed says a little gleefully of the resulting coverage, “and further spotlighted the fact that all these very talented people are just organically wearing Whoop because of the value it provides.”
Ahmed is careful to protect it. The company has a long-standing policy against giving athletes equity in exchange for wearing the band. His reasoning? If they like the product, they’ll wear it regardless. Formal partnerships with Ferrari, the PGA Tour, and UCI mountain biking work differently; they’re about putting the brand in front of larger audiences who share the same sensibility.
Oura, by the way, is doing the same math. Founded just one year after Whoop, the company is widely reported to be exploring an IPO. If Oura goes public first, it sets the financial benchmarks — revenue multiples, growth rates, retention metrics — against which Whoop will be measured. Whoop currently employs around 750 people and is in the middle of hiring 600 more.
Ahmed gives little away on the subject. “If we focus on building great technology and growing our business,” he says, “we’re going to be happy with Whoop when we’re a public company, independent from who goes public first.”
He speaks throughout the conversation the way someone does when they’ve thought carefully about what they should and shouldn’t say. Ahmed was captain of the Harvard squash team and counts Ali Farag, who went on to become world number one, among his former teammates — though he’s quick to note that proximity to greatness shouldn’t be mistaken for greatness itself.
“You probably have the wrong impression of how good I am at squash on the basis of me being teammates with him,” he jokes.
He started building what would become Whoop in 2011, reading hundreds of medical papers while studying economics and government, trying to solve a problem he’d experienced firsthand: overtraining without any reliable way to measure its toll on his body.
Whoop isn’t just Ahmed’s first company. It has been his only full-time job. When I ask whether he’d recommend that path to a founder sitting where he was in 2012, it’s the question he answers most freely.
Starting a company is, for the right person with the right intentions, “without question, the most extraordinary thing you can do in your career.” But it is, he adds, “a very painful experience to be an entrepreneur and to try to build something from scratch, and you have to have a reasonably high pain threshold that I think often gets lost in the glamour of fundraising announcements and milestones.” You need to be, he says, “more obsessed with the problem you’re solving than with the idea of being a founder.”
He doesn’t seem to have much doubt about which side of that line he’s on.
Tech
Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds
The team from Bluesky has built another app — and this time, it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that allows you to design your own algorithm, create custom feeds, and, one day, vibe-code your own app.
At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, Bluesky’s former CEO, Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee, presented the AI app, called Attie, for the first time. Conference attendees will become the initial beta testers for the new experience, which leverages Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create an agentic social app built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short).
“It’s a new product — it’s not a part of the Bluesky app,” explains interim CEO Toni Schneider in an interview. (In addition to his CEO role, Schneider is a partner at Bluesky backer True Ventures.) “We’ve launched a lot of things inside Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one that’s built by Jay’s new team.”
With Attie, anyone will be able to build their own custom feed just by typing in commands in natural language, the same as if they’re chatting with any other AI chatbot. To use the app, people will sign in with their Atmosphere login (meaning their login for any app that runs on atproto, which includes Bluesky). Attie will immediately understand what you’ve been talking about, what sort of things you like, and more, because Bluesky and the wider ecosystem are open systems that share data across apps.
You can ask Attie questions, like what posts you might like to see or repost, and you can use the app to curate your own custom feed, personalized to you.
“You control it, you shape it, without having to write code or know how to set up these feeds,” Schneider says. “It’s the beginning of just having a lot more people be able to build on top of the Atmosphere.”
Plus, he adds, “It is an AI product, but it’s an AI product that’s very people-focused … We think AI is a very powerful technology, but we want to make sure that we use it to build things that really benefit people.”
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At launch, Attie can be used to build and view these feeds, which will later become available to you within Bluesky or any other atproto app. Over time, the plan is to allow Attie’s users to vibe-code their own social apps as well as build tools for other people.
Schneider says that Graber and her team began working on the app a few months ago, which was around the same time she decided to return to building, instead of running the company.
“I think she realized that there was so much more that she wanted to build, and just doing the CEO job kept her busy, and she felt like she wanted more time,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. “As she spent more time, [and] got freed up, I think it became clear that this is her happy place. She’s an amazing leader and visionary, and we want her building more things and not worrying about operating the company,” he says.
Graber says today, AI is being used by the major platforms to serve themselves, not their users, by trying to increase people’s time spent in their apps, harvesting data, and controlling their algorithms.
“We think AI should serve people, not platforms,” Graber said in her announcement of Attie. “An open protocol puts this power directly in users’ hands. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise.”
Graber’s decision to once again focus on protocol and product was followed by the company’s announcement that it now has $100 million in additional funding from a round that closed last year. The team hopes that news serves as a signal to the wider community that Bluesky will continue to be around.
“It means we have three-plus years of runway, which is great. That means stability and security for the rest of the ecosystem,” Schneider tells TechCrunch. It also means that Bluesky’s team has time to tackle the bigger challenges ahead, which include adding privacy controls to the protocol and finding a way to monetize the social network of 43.4 million users.
One thing that Schneider assures us is not in the works, however, is any crypto integration — despite the financial backing from multiple crypto investors. That’s something that had worried some Bluesky users, who feared the app would be filled with crypto scams or become a payment tool.
“It’s the kind of investors who were attracted to crypto because of its decentralization, and they were investing in things built on the blockchain that were super decentralized,” Schneider says of Bluesky’s backers in the crypto space. “This is decentralized social, so it fits those who are invested to believe in the platform and the ecosystem opportunity.”
Instead, the company may experiment with other means of monetization. The team hasn’t yet decided if Attie will ultimately require a fee, as it’s only a private beta for the time being. Other ideas being batted around include subscriptions and hosting services for those who want to host their own communities on the protocol.
Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, the home of publishing platform WordPress.com, sees the potential for the Atmosphere as being similar to WordPress in this way.
“At the center of [the Atmosphere] is a completely open system, so anybody can participate,” he says. “You can have all of these independent, decentralized pieces that work together. With WordPress, that turned into a huge ecosystem with billions of dollars — over $10 billion a year, now — flowing through it.”
Schneider continues, “So it’s gotten very big, even though it’s completely decentralized. And this is what we’re hoping for, for the Atmosphere to have that similar ability for lots of these apps and services to coexist and work together and build an ecosystem.”
Tech
David Sacks is done as AI czar — here’s what he’s doing instead
David Sacks has used up his days as Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar.
Speaking with Bloomberg on Thursday, the longtime entrepreneur, investor, and podcaster confirmed that his non-consecutive 130-day stint as a special government employee is over and that he’s moving on to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) alongside senior White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios.
“I think moving forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations on not just AI but an expanded range of technology topics,” he told Bloomberg via a video interview. “So yes, this is how I’ll be involved moving forward.”
What that means in practice is Sacks will be much further from the power center in Washington than since the outset of this second Trump administration. As AI czar, Sacks had a direct line to Trump and a hand in shaping policy. PCAST is a federal advisory body, so while it studies issues, produces reports, and sends recommendations up the chain, it doesn’t make policy.
The council has existed in some form since FDR, though Sacks made a point to Bloomberg of noting that this particular iteration has “the most star power of any group like this” ever assembled, and it’s hard to argue he’s wrong. The initial 15 members include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, AMD’s Lisa Su, and Michael Dell, among others. (That’s a lot of billionaires.)
Sacks told Bloomberg the council will take up AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing, and nuclear power, and that near-term attention will go toward pushing Trump’s national AI framework, released just last week. The framework is aimed at replacing what Sacks described to Bloomberg as a mess of conflicting state-level rules. “You’ve got 50 different states regulating this in 50 different ways,” he said, “and it’s creating a patchwork of regulation that’s difficult for our innovators to comply with.”
What Sacks didn’t address head-on was why the transition is happening now and whether his recent comments were a factor. Earlier this month, on the popular “All In” podcast that he co-hosts, Sacks publicly urged the administration to find an exit from the U.S.-backed war with Iran, walking through a set of worsening scenarios — attacks on oil infrastructure in neighboring countries, the destruction of desalination plants, the possibility of nuclear use by Israel — and calling for a polite way out. Trump responded by telling reporters that Sacks hadn’t spoken to him about the war. (The U.S.-Israel war on Iran has now been going on for approximately 27 days.)
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Asked about the podcast episode on Thursday by Bloomberg, Sacks figuratively threw his hands in the air: “I’m not on the foreign policy team or the national security team,” he said, adding that his podcast comments represented his personal view, not an official one.
For all the marquee names Sacks is bringing to PCAST, it’s worth reflecting on what the council has historically been, which is an advisory body with some influence in some administrations and almost none in others.
President Obama’s version was seemingly the most productive on record, churning out 36 reports over eight years — two of which led to concrete policy changes, including an FDA rule that opened the market for over-the-counter hearing aids.
President Trump’s first-term council, by contrast, took nearly three years just to name its first members, produced a handful of reports, and made no particular mark, while President Biden’s council skewed heavily academic — Nobel laureates, MacArthur fellows, National Academy members — and issued a modest number of reports before the administration ended.
The current PCAST is a completely different animal, built almost entirely from the executive suites of the companies shaping the technology it will advise on.
Now, Sacks is again one of those unencumbered executives, free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A spokesperson for Craft Ventures, the firm Sacks co-founded and where he remains a partner, has not yet responded to related questions about next steps; TechCrunch reported last year on the ethics waivers Sacks obtained to maintain financial stakes in AI and crypto companies while shaping federal policy in both areas — an arrangement that drew sharp criticism from ethics experts and lawmakers.
Tech
OpenAI shuts down Sora while Meta gets shut out in court
When an 82-year-old Kentucky woman was offered $26 million from an AI company that wanted to build a data center on her land, she said no. Sure, that same company can try to rezone 2,000 acres nearby anyway, but as AI infrastructure stretches further into the real world, the real world is starting to push back.
That tension is everywhere this week, from OpenAI shutting down its Sora app to courts finally starting to hold social platforms like Meta accountable. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what it looks like when the AI hype cycle meets reality.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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