Fitness tracker Whoop just opened its Advanced Labs blood testing service to a staggering 350,000-person waitlist, marking the company's bold expansion beyond wearables into subscription health diagnostics. The move signals how fitness tech companies are racing to capture the lucrative wellness market by combining device data with clinical testing.
The fitness tracking world just got a lot more clinical. Whoop officially launched its Advanced Labs service Tuesday, opening the floodgates to what the company says is a 350,000-person waitlist that's been building since the service was first previewed back in May.
The numbers tell a compelling story about pent-up demand for integrated health monitoring. That waitlist represents roughly the population of Iceland, all eager to combine their wrist-worn data with lab results. It's a validation of Whoop's bet that consumers want their fitness metrics married to actual blood chemistry - not just step counts and sleep scores.
Whoop Advanced Labs partners with Quest Diagnostics to offer comprehensive blood panels covering everything from basic metabolic markers like calcium and glucose to more detailed readings including white blood cell counts and lipid profiles. But here's where it gets interesting - those lab results feed directly into Whoop's existing ecosystem of continuous monitoring data from activity levels, sleep patterns, respiratory rate, and blood pressure.
The pricing structure reveals Whoop's subscription-first mentality. Advanced Labs costs $199 for one annual test, $349 for two tests, or $599 for four tests per year. That's on top of the Whoop device membership itself, which runs $200 to $350 annually depending on which strap features you want. For committed users, you're looking at nearly $1,000 per year for the full experience.
Whoop's timing couldn't be better positioned in the booming subscription wellness market. The company joins a rapidly expanding field of startups betting that consumers will pay out-of-pocket for regular health screenings. Dr. Mark Hyman's Function Health charges $500 annually for quarterly blood tests plus optional body imaging. At the premium end, longevity startup Fountain Life - backed by Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis - commands over $20,000 per year for comprehensive health monitoring and intervention programs.
What sets Whoop apart is the continuous data integration angle. While Function Health and similar services provide periodic snapshots of your health markers, Whoop can theoretically correlate those blood results with daily biometric patterns. Did your inflammatory markers spike after that week of poor sleep scores? Is your metabolic panel reflecting the recovery data your device has been tracking?
