Whoop's $10.1 Billion Bet: Wearables Chase Medicare Money

By Amara Osei

Whoop closed a $575 million Series G in March at a $10.1 billion valuation, and the company's next growth market isn't elite athletes. It's Medicare recipients. In August, the wearables maker launched Whoop Connected Care, a pilot program for beneficiaries 65 and older diagnosed with hypertension, prediabetes, high cholesterol, or obesity.

The bundle includes a Whoop membership, a device, and a third-party blood pressure monitor and cuff. "Continuous data matters," says Dr. Ami Bhatt, a board-certified cardiologist who joined Whoop as chief medical officer over the summer. "People want to perform and age well, and that's what we're aiming for."

Founder and CEO Will Ahmed, a former Harvard squash cocaptain who started Whoop in the early 2010s to help serious athletes optimize performance, built the brand on ambassadors like Cristiano Ronaldo and Patrick Mahomes. But women older than 60 are now one of Whoop's fastest-growing customer segments, according to the company. The shift tracks a broader move: consumers chasing wellness are drifting into preventive healthcare, and wearables firms are hiring physicians and courting clinical partners to capture it. Whoop rival Oura was valued at $11 billion at its $900 million Series E last year.

The commercial logic is blunt. There are only so many weekend warriors willing to pay hundreds of dollars a year for step counts and deep-sleep minutes. Connecting device data to medical insights widens the audience — and, as Fast Company reports, taps Medicare's $1.2 trillion budget.

How did the FDA's rules change?

The FDA has historically split devices into two camps: medical devices, designed to diagnose and treat disease under strict approval rules, and wellness devices that support healthy lifestyles more loosely. Whoop and Oura deliberately blur that line.

"The latest generation of wearables delivers clinical-grade insights," Oura CEO Tom Hale wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December calling for federal policy changes.

Whoop tested the boundary directly. When the FDA sent a warning letter last summer questioning its blood pressure tracking feature, the company edited its app interface to clarify the feature was not diagnostic — and refused to budge further. In January, the FDA issued new guidance giving wellness devices far greater leeway to measure physiology associated with chronic conditions. Six months later, it dropped its enforcement action against Whoop's blood pressure feature.

What are the companies actually shipping?

Both firms are racing to use the friendlier rules:

• In May, Oura partnered with virtual care provider Counsel Health. When biometrics show "major signs of strain" — body temperature, resting heart rate — Oura emails users suggesting they "Connect with a Doctor who has context."
• Whoop members can upload medical records, complete blood work with Quest Diagnostics covering more than 100 biomarkers, and reach doctors on-demand.
• Whoop's top-tier device is the Whoop MG, short for "medical grade," even though it isn't an FDA-approved medical device.
• Oura built a GLP-1 user experience; Whoop is partnering with the National Council on Aging and AARP to tailor its product for older users.

Bhatt, previously inaugural chair of the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee and chief innovation officer at the American College of Cardiology, says wearables shouldn't replace clinical care. "What we need to be doing is helping people understand their baseline and helping clinicians understand what's happening in between visits," she says.

Does the data hold up clinically?

Researchers see gaps. Sandeep Kishore, a physician-scientist and associate professor at UC San Francisco, calls the current moment a "twilight zone": devices generate reams of data, but the algorithms behind it are proprietary and hard to validate independently.

Whoop's Blood Pressure Insights and Oura's NighttimeBP avoid regulation by design. "Nighttime BP does not display mmHg values," Oura's FAQ explains. "It shows dipping patterns and trends, not absolute blood pressure measurements." Patients bring the outputs to doctors anyway. "I'm having a bunch of unvalidated data coming in to me, and I'm being asked to react to that," Kishore says.

A Nature paper published in January found the Apple Watch excels at some measurements, like resting heart rate, but fails at others, like energy expenditure.

Providers are experimenting regardless — three in four American adults live with a chronic condition. "The current system isn't working," says Chris Curry, an ob-gyn and clinical director of women's health at Oura. "Let's try something new." Curry envisions Oura feeding research on optimal drug dosing: "We want to be part of the scientific literature that lets physicians more smartly prescribe."

Bhatt is recruiting collaborators in cardiometabolic health, women's health, and neurology. "They say 80 is the new 50, right?" she says. The line only holds if Whoop can prove its devices improve health outcomes — at which point consumers, doctors, and insurers all come knocking.