WHOOP, the human performance company, announced a $25 million Series C financing round led by UAE71 Capital with participation from the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), Durant Company, Thursday Ventures and existing investors including Two Sigma Ventures, Accomplice, Mousse Partners, Promus Ventures and NextView Ventures.
Individuals participating include David Stern, National Basketball Association (NBA) commissioner emeritus; Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter; Russell Okung, offensive tackle for the Los Angeles Chargers of the National Football League; Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital and Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and One Laptop per Child. PJT Partners acted as financial advisor on this capital raise.
WHOOP will use the financing to accelerate global scale and international expansion of its human performance technology across the Elite and Consumer markets. The company has established itself as a clear leader in professional sports, working with over 100 of the most valuable sports properties in the world. In 2017, WHOOP was approved for in-game use by Major League Baseball, landed a groundbreaking partnership as the Official Recovery Wearable of the NFLPA, became the go-to performance optimization system for many NBA stars, and continued its rapid expansion with collegiate teams such as Duke University Men’s Basketball. At the same time, WHOOP continues to rapidly expand in the consumer market, recording back-to-back record sales months in November and December 2017, and driving overwhelming demand to start 2018.
“We are at a unique moment in time in that humans are just now discovering what allows them to perform at the highest level,” said Will Ahmed, Founder & CEO. “Our mission at WHOOP remains focused on unlocking human performance. We welcome our new and returning investors who see the massive opportunity to bring our human performance technology to the world.”
As part of the financing round, WHOOP is also announcing the addition of four new team members:
- Antonio Bertone has joined the WHOOP management team as chief marketing officer, and will maintain his seat on the company’s Board of Directors. Bertone previously served as the global chief marketing officer of PUMA, overseeing everything from brand to creative during a groundbreaking 20-year tenure, widely credited for not just elevating the profile of the global lifestyle brand, but creating new categories in the process.
- David Stern has joined the company as an advisor, and will help support WHOOP’s vision to empower professional athletes with data to improve health and enable longer careers.
- AG Gangadhar, the former head of engineering at Uber and investor through Thursday Ventures, will advise the company on best practices for scaling the unprecedented size and granularity of WHOOP data.
- Nicholas Negroponte has joined the company’s Board of Directors.