A WHOOPing Masters from Rory McIlroy

WHOOP CEO shares The Master's Champion's WHOOP scores on route to his second win at Augusta, shortly after closing in on a $575M funding round

If you live in Southwest London in your mid to late twenties, there are a few stereotypes you’re expected to embody. It’s wavered over the years, from the yummy-mummy era of the 90s to marathon running, On Running, VEJA wearing, influencer spotting and £4.50 coffees from WatchHouse in Battersea Park. The most prominent movement right now though is the health and wellness boom of the last five years, with brands like WHOOP, Oura Ring and Fitbit emerging with genuine velocity.

I’ll be honest, I sit somewhere on the fringe of the cult. I have the VEJA shoes and Lululemon ABCs (best purchase of my life, no notes), but my watch is a hand-me-down and I’m yet to own a pair of On Clouds. I also don’t need a wearable to tell me that after two beers my sleep score plummets like a Peloton valuation. Rory McIlroy, however, as both an investor and ambassador, presumably finds the data rather more useful to his game. He was spotted wearing the shamrock-coloured wearable during his latest quest for a Masters title (two years in a row).

Will Ahmed, CEO of WHOOP, took to LinkedIn within hours of Rory lifting the jacket to share a quick overview of Rory’s biometrics from Masters week. Rory boasted four straight days of green recovery scores, a resting heart rate of 47-49 bpm, a heart rate spike of 135 bpm on the 18th tee, dropping to a composed 105 bpm for the tap-in putt, and then a very reasonable 150 bpm for the celebration. Followed by what definitely looks like a few creamy pints of Guinness to celebrate, with undoubtedly a few bottles of champagne on the Gulfstream back to Holywood, Golf Club.

WHOOP’s top down approach with their ambassadors and their fundraising journey

WHOOP’s go-to-market has always moved in one direction: top down. Put the device on Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Patrick Mahomes, Rory McIlroy, Virgil van Dijk and Aryna Sabalenka, let the data speak publicly, and let aspiration handle the rest.

The comparison worth making (dare I say it) is the iPhone. Apple built a device so embedded in daily life that switching costs became psychological rather than financial. WHOOP is attempting something structurally similar, a subscription model built around continuous health data that becomes more valuable the longer you wear it. Your sleep trends, strain patterns and recovery baselines over three years of training are genuinely harder to walk away from than any hardware feature. That’s a real moat, if they can hold the subscriber long enough. Granted, you need a phone, you don’t need a Whoop.

The problem is the competitive environment in 2026 looks nothing like the one Apple navigated. Garmin is forecasting $7.9 billion in revenue and just entered the screenless recovery market directly. Oura is heading toward $2 billion in sales, and is turning an annualized profit after paying back their creditors, unlike WHOOP. Apple Watch already sits on more wrists than any other wearable. The LTV model only works if churn stays low enough for the data flywheel to spin, and in a market where every major player now offers some version of recovery tracking, that arguments hard to make. So let’s take a look at their fundraising timeline, to get a feel for what’s on the horizon for the Boston-based health tech co.

IPO IPO IPO

The IPO is no longer a rumour. After closing the Series G, Will Ahmed told Yahoo Finance plainly: “It’s our expectation this is the last private round of financing that we’ll do.” He’d already told Bloomberg in November 2025 that he was thinking about it “over a horizon of two years,” which in founder-speak means the bankers are already in the calendar.

However, similarly to the larger brands hunting for IPO windows in 2022, I’m a little nervous. We’re surrounded by wars, inflation fears are creeping back, and the AI spending party is starting to look like the morning after, everyone’s still there but nobody’s quite sure who’s paying the bill. Luckily for WHOOP, having raised north of $950 million already, even if they miss a window they’ve probably got enough on the balance sheet to keep going. It also sounds like they’re not burning through cash quite as enthusiastically as, say, your ChatGPT’s of the World. So if they do have a provenly strong LTV:CAC ratio I’m a little less worried for retail investors in the long term.

What happens after the bell rings is the more interesting question. Founders and early investors will be subject to lock-in periods, typically 90 to 180 days, during which they can’t sell a single share regardless of what the price does. If public markets look at a $10.1 billion valuation on a company that was running at negative EBITDA as recently as 2025, with Garmin, Apple and Oura all circling the same category, they may decide the recovery score on this particular investment needs a re-check. A post-IPO correction would be uncomfortable, but history tells us: expected. It would also be, for most of the people involved, comfortably uncomfortable. When Rory McIlroy, Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes and LeBron James are on your cap table, nobody is losing sleep. Just as long as Tom Brady’s not on it, we’re good.