Whoop, a Boston MA-based provider of a performance optimization system for elite athletes and teams, raised $12m in Series B funding.
The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures with participation from Mousse Partners, Accomplice, Promus Ventures, Valley Oak Investments, and NextView Ventures.
The company intends to use the funds to scale its business targeting professional and collegiate teams and to continue the development its technology.
Led by CEO and founder Will Ahmed, Whoop has developed a platform that continuously measures every athlete’s strain and recovery, which helps balance training plans, prevent injury, and increase team performance. It is currently being used by athletes on teams across all major U.S. professional sports leagues and college conferences.
The system includes a wrist-worn strap that measures key strain and recovery variables more than 100 times per second, 24 hours a day. Proprietary algorithms then process this data to provide athletes an Intensity score, which informs them about the level of strain on their body and what it means; a Recovery score, which measures the body’s preparedness for strain or exertion; and a Sleep Performance score, which evaluates the hours of quality sleep an athlete got in relationship to the sleep he or she needed.
The platform presents a team dashboard to coaches and trainers to help inform training and game day decisions.
The strap is a device designed to be always on – worn by athletes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It collects more than 150 MB of physiological data per day based on five metrics:
Heart Rate (HR) – Tracking and accurately reporting instantaneous heart rate.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV) – Automatically analyzing, while an athlete is asleep, the tiniest variations in time between beats of his or her resting heart rate, providing detailed insights into the complex relationship of stresses on the body, cardiovascular health, and recovery.
Skin Conductivity – Monitoring an athlete’s skin moisture, helping understand activity and sleep latency.
Ambient Temperature – Combining observation of the environment in which an athlete is active with other sensor data to better understand his or her body’s response.
Accelerometery & Motion – Knowing when and how an athlete is moving to understand not only his or her activity level but also refining the heart rate signal during exercise and providing insights into sleep quality.
That data is streamed via Bluetooth to an analytics platform that analyzes Intensity, Recovery, and Sleep Performance. Coaches and trainers can view each athlete’s data on a team dashboard to determine what activities they have engaged in, how much strain they have placed on themselves, and how they have recovered. Coaches and trainers then can see which athletes are undertraining or which are overtraining and putting themselves at risk of an injury, resulting in improved individual and team performance. Privacy settings allow teams to customize how data is shared between coaches and athletes as well as athletes with one another.
The company is now working with teams across the NFL, NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, and the English Premier League, along with several Olympic teams and trainers for elite athletes, such as LeBron James and Michael Phelps. At the collegiate level, Whoop is being used in all major conferences, including the SEC, Big 10, Pac 10, ACC, Big 12, and the Ivy League.
It is available for professional, collegiate, and Olympic teams and athletes.
FinSMEs
22/09/2015