The investment in Cristiano Ronaldo has attracted worldwide attention with the football superstar becoming a personal investor in WHOOP, a wearable device company currently worth 10.1 billion. The company has recently raised a 575M Series G financing round, approximately three times its 2021 valuation of 3.6 billion.
The fact that there are several top athletes as investors is what makes this deal of great interest. Coupled with Ronaldo, there were also such stars as LeBron James, Rory McIlroy, and Virgil van Dijk. These athletes are not just endorsers, but they are longtime users of WHOOP, who have been using its data-driven insights to guide sleep, recovery, and exercise strain before making a personal investment decision.
WHOOP is a startup that provides a differentiating product: a wristband without a watch face, which was started by Will Ahmed in 2012 at Harvard Innovation Lab. It has a very narrow-minded purpose to follow heart rate variability, sleep quality, and recovery 24 hours a day to inform users about their preparedness to serious exercise. Compared to multifunction smartwatches such as Apple Watch, the specialty of WHOOP has earned it a reputation among professional athletes and serious fitness enthusiasts.
The high valuation of the company is supported by subscription-based model, 24 billion hours of physiological data, and certified medical-grade electrocardiogram monitoring by the FDA. The company has also been supported by the institutional investors, among them the Qatar Investment Authority, Mubadala, Abbott, and the Mayo Clinic, who have emphasized its increasingly strong presence in healthcare technology.
The investment of Cristiano Ronaldo highlights an increase in the trend of the use of top athletes to turn their personal experience with technology into a strategic investment in financial assets. It is also an indicator of the growing overlap between sports and health technology as well as high-value investment opportunities.
