Whoop Inc. has made its second round of layoffs in the past year.
The Boston fitness tracker company confirmed to BostInno that it recently laid off 4% of its corporate workforce. A spokesperson said the layoffs impacted 22 members of the company’s B2B business called Whoop Unite, which launched last year.
The spokesperson said Whoop recently made the decision to “sharpen its focus as it relates to enterprise deals through Whoop Unite and focus on partnerships with mature product market fit.”
The company calls its wristband a wearable health and fitness coach that provides data on things like heart-rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep and respiratory rate. Customers pay a $30/month subscription fee for the device and accompanying app.
Last July, Whoop made company-wide layoffs that impacted 15% of its corporate team. At the time, Whoop cited the “challenges and uncertainty” of the current environment as the impetus behind the layoffs. Whoop said it was “building a durable business that is able to withstand whatever economic climate we find ourselves in.” Before these layoffs, the Boston-based sports tech startup had more than 630 employees.
Whoop was just one of 17 tech companies with presence in Massachusetts that, in total, laid off thousands of workers in 2022. The trend has continued into 2023 as tech companies including Pegasystems Inc. and Kopin Corp. announced job cuts in the first weeks of January.
Whoop was founded over a decade ago by former Harvard athlete Will Ahmed. The company is well-known for the athletes who use its wearable fitness trackers, including professional athletes like Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps. But Mark McLaughlin, Whoop’s chief business officer, previously told BostInno that CEO Ahmed envisioned Whoop as more of a “team sale than an individual sale” when he founded the company.
The Boston company launched its B2B business, Whoop Unite, last June. They provide companies’ employees with Whoop’s wristbands, and employees can opt into sharing this data for administrators to analyze.
“We’ve evolved what is more of a true enterprise SaaS business where we can provide aggregated insights to the organization for those employees that opt into it and then actually drive to improvable value and outcomes,” McLaughlin told BostInno in November.
McLaughlin said Whoop had over 200 customers across industries, double from a year prior. The groups using Whoop’s technology included NCAA teams, healthcare providers and U.S. military.
Whoop also recently expanded into brick and mortar. Its products are in over 250 stores at Best Buy and Dick's locations.
