WHOOP Turned a Sleep Tracker Into a Medicare Pathway, and Oura May Help Tell Us What That's Worth

Will Ahmed pitched WHOOP to well over a hundred investors before one said yes. He was 22, captain of Harvard's squash team, and convinced that his own chronic fatigue was a data problem nobody had bothered to solve. The company came within weeks of running out of cash more than once. Fourteen years later, WHOOP closed a round that values it at $10.1 billion, with Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and the Qatar Investment Authority writing checks alongside the Mayo Clinic and Abbott.

That is a strange group to find on one cap table. It is also the clearest signal of what WHOOP has become, which is no longer a fitness tracker.

The subscription that never sells you hardware

WHOOP's core trick has always been refusing to sell a device. Members pay $199 to $359 a year for a membership; the screenless band is bundled in, and hardware refreshes ship to existing members as part of the deal. More than 3 million members now pay for that membership, per the company, with the most recent million added in just seven months. That decision — made when the company was bleeding cash and Ahmed was studying how the public markets had treated Fitbit and Peloton — is why WHOOP now looks like a software company wearing a hardware company's clothes. Bookings exited 2025 at a $1.1 billion annualized run rate, up 103%, and the company turned operating-cash-flow positive along the way. Third-party estimates put blended gross margins in the 40s to 50s, with the subscription layer alone near 70% — SaaS economics strapped to a wrist, subsidizing the plastic that gets it there.

The difference between "wearable" and "subscription" is not semantic. A device company's incentive is to sell you a new device every two years. A membership company's incentive is to keep you for ten. Those incentives produce different products, and they produce very different public-market multiples. That is where Oura comes in, as discussed below.

Health, not fitness

The more interesting shift is in what WHOOP is selling. The WHOOP MG carries FDA clearance for ECG and atrial-fibrillation detection. Advanced Labs puts clinician-reviewed blood panels inside the app — two draws a year through a national lab network for a few hundred dollars, where a hospital might bill several thousand for the equivalent work. And this month WHOOP went live inside the CMS Innovation Center's ACCESS program, offering eligible Medicare beneficiaries a device, coaching and clinical support through a reimbursed pathway at no out-of-pocket cost, in 14 states with national rollout planned.

Fitness is a category with a ceiling on what people will spend; Peloton found it. Health is not. A company that earns the right to sit inside someone's daily physiological data — and then uses that position to walk into diagnostics and reimbursed care — is competing for a very different budget than the one it started in. That is a reason Abbott and the Mayo Clinic are on the cap table rather than building the equivalent in-house.

The moat nobody can port over

Strip away the marketing and WHOOP's real asset could be the more than 24 billion hours of continuous physiological signal, which is sampled far more densely than the periodic pings a typical smartwatch takes to save battery. That volume compounds into a personal recovery baseline so specific that switching brands means abandoning years of your own health history, which nobody wants to do once they've built it. Oura is matching WHOOP's blood panels now. Google built a screenless Fitbit specifically to look like a WHOOP band. Garmin shipped a $199 screenless band with no subscription. None of them can hand a five-year member their own data back.

It also helps that this is an additive category rather than a substitutive one. Oura's own S-1 says 37% of its new members wear the ring alongside another device and only 29% replaced one. The wrist is not zero-sum.

Three things Oura's S-1 tells us about WHOOP

Oura — the smart-ring company and WHOOP's closest comparable — filed publicly for a Nasdaq listing on September 3, targeting a valuation reported above $16 billion. Reading a competitor's prospectus is the closest thing private-market investors get to a public comp with audited numbers, and this one is unusually informative.

1. The market will pay a real multiple for wearable health — even on a hardware-heavy mix. Oura reported fiscal 2025 revenue of roughly $970 million, up 100%, and its October 2025 Series E valued it at $11 billion, about 11x trailing revenue; the IPO is reportedly targeting a similar multiple on ~$1.4 billion of trailing sales. The striking part is the mix: in fiscal 2025, Oura's hardware revenue grew by about $418 million while membership revenue grew by about $83 million. Roughly four-fifths of the business is ring sales — a $300-to-$500 device followed by a $6-a-month subscription. WHOOP's Series G priced it at roughly 9x its bookings run rate for a business that is essentially all membership. If public investors reward recurring revenue the way they have in every other category, the multiple gap between these two currently runs the wrong way.

2. Hardware bites, and where it bites depends on the model. Oura's gross margin fell from 65% in fiscal 2024 to 52% in fiscal 2025, almost entirely on elevated warranty reserves for Ring 4 battery issues. That is what happens when the hardware is the product: a defect shows up in the P&L immediately and at scale. WHOOP's blended gross margin is lower than Oura's on paper, because it subsidizes the band inside the membership — but the hardware risk is amortized across a subscription rather than recognized on a sale, and a member whose band fails gets a replacement, not a refund. Neither model is free of hardware risk. They just carry it in different places, and the public market is about to price one of them.

3. Engagement is the metric that will separate the two. Oura's S-1 discloses 85% twelve-month paid-member retention, 94% conversion from ring activation to paid membership, roughly 40% of new members acquired organically, and a daily-to-monthly active ratio of about 65%. Those are excellent consumer numbers. Sell-side research citing WHOOP management presentations this spring suggest WHOOP's daily-to-monthly ratio near 85%, with around eight app opens a day. A strap you pay $20 a month for is a habit; a ring you bought once is closer to an accessory. If the WHOOP figures hold up to public scrutiny, they are the single strongest argument that its membership deserves a subscription multiple rather than a device one — and Oura's listing is what will make that comparison visible.

The S-1 also settles one debate. Both companies doubled last year. This is not, so far, a one-winner category.

The FDA fight that became a rulebook

In July 2025 the FDA sent WHOOP a warning letter over its Blood Pressure Insights feature, arguing that estimating blood pressure from a wrist sensor crossed from wellness into medical claims. WHOOP publicly disputed the letter rather than folding, then modified the feature — replacing a diagnostic-looking readout with a color gradient — and in January 2026 the FDA updated its general-wellness guidance. In effect the industry now has a template: real physiological estimates can be surfaced under a wellness label provided they are never framed as a diagnosis. WHOOP then hired the former chair of the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee as its Chief Medical Officer. That rulebook arrived just in time for the Medicare program.

The numbers that should make you pause

Here is the part that does not show up in press releases. WHOOP is one of the most actively quoted names in the private secondary market, and the quotes are all over the place — common stock has been indicated anywhere from about $7 to over $13 a share this summer, against a Series G price of $11.23. The cheapest of those quotes imply valuations in the $6-to-7 billion range, a steep discount to the round. But a quote is not a price. The company has apparently been exercising its right of first refusal on discounted common transfers, and many of the deeply discounted blocks we have seen indicated this year did not close. From our understanding, the trades that have been closing (and the preferred stock that actually changes hands) have sat closer to $9 to $11. Anyone reading a single platform's indicative price as "where WHOOP trades" could be reading an option on the company's consent, not a market.

The operating bear case is more conventional. Consumer subscriptions churn (Oura implies ~15% annual churn in their release), and the well-documented engagement drop-off a few months into any wellness product applies here too. Apple does not have to beat WHOOP to hurt it; a good-enough free readiness score on the Watch lowers the ceiling on casual adoption. And a company that just hired a Nike CMO, a Glossier CEO and a Klaviyo CAO in one summer (while doubling the size of their Boston HQ) is a company about to spend heavily on growth ahead of a listing.

Why this matters

The interesting companies in this cycle are not the ones selling gadgets. They are the ones that used a gadget to earn a position inside a data stream nobody else can replicate, and then used that position to walk into a bigger, stickier, better-funded market than the one they started in. WHOOP built a fitness brand on LeBron James and Michael Phelps and is expanding through Medicare and Abbott. Oura's prospectus and listing process will now help tell us just the public market is willing to pay for that category; WHOOP's model is a bet that it will pay more for the version with no hardware sale in it.

WHOOP spent its first decade convincing elite athletes that recovery was worth obsessing over. It is spending this one convincing Medicare. If that bet lands, the band on your wrist stops being a gadget and becomes the cheapest way into a healthcare system that has never before had to compete for a customer.

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