WHOOP has been very active in the Boston tech scene. Not only is the company a massive success story in the fitness wearable device industry, the company has been leading the charge with various initiatives including WHOOP Tech Pulse, an event series, and the Boston AI Coalition. We connected with Ryan Durkin, WHOOP’s VP AI @ Work to get all the details.
Q: What is Tech Pulse?
A: WHOOP Tech Pulse is a curated event series that celebrates the role of AI in Boston’s tech ecosystem. It’s not a typical mixer, but discussions centered around the intersection of AI and various topics, and featuring founders and top tier tech operators from Boston. These events feature curious, driven people who discuss and debate ideas, which flows into networking post panel. We launched the quarterly event series at the tail end of 2024, and just held our 4th event. The series attracts ~200+ attendees per event, maxing out our existing building capacity. Each gathering is thematic, with panels of tech operators and founders exploring cutting-edge intersections of AI across industries.
Q: How did the idea of Tech Pulse come to fruition?
A: We believe the AI era demands active, real-time conversation among tech operators. The industry is evolving too quickly for passive observation. Boston needed an additional stage where people from consumer tech, B2B software, hardware, and hybrid spaces could come together to hear interesting conversations. In a post-COVID world, the event landscape thinned in Boston. One of our goals with Tech Pulse is to bring people back together for topical, high-signal in-person events, and hopefully motivate other companies to host their own. We want to reinforce Boston’s role as an innovation hub in tech.
Q: Can you recap past events and preview what’s ahead?
A: So far we’ve hosted four WHOOP Tech Pulse events. The first was at the intersection of AI & Product (our Nov 2024 launch), the second at the intersection of AI & Talent, and the third at the intersection of AI & Health. For our fourth event this past week, we focused on AI & Hardware, Robotics & Autonomy, with speakers Rylan Hamilton (Cofounder & CEO of Blue Water Autonomy), Ignacio Galiana (Cofounder & CEO of Verve Motion), Cecilia Liu (Founder of a company in stealth), and Mark Martin (Cofounder and GP at Cybernetics Ventures), emceed by Sean Muniz (VP, Manufacturing Technology at WHOOP). We have two more events in the Tech Pulse series, one aimed at AI & Marketing and AI & Design both planned for Q1 2026. From there, we plan to launch more niche specific series, diving deeper into each of the six past event topics.
Q: What value does WHOOP get from hosting these events?
A: Tech Pulse advances thoughtful AI debate across Boston, introduces WHOOP to top talent and innovators for recruiting, and sparks serendipitous connections that strengthen the tech community. Our hope with these events is to provide an outlet for curious people interested in AI to meet in-person and hopefully get inspired enough to start/join a tech company in Boston. One additional byproduct of hosting these events has been that multiple other Boston area companies have expressed interest in holding their own event series. We’d love to see a world where there are hundreds of similar events held per year, and have the tech environment feel alive like it did in the early 2010’s…. when there felt like there were 4-5 educational/social tech events every week going on in town.
Q: How is WHOOP leaning in on AI?
A: We’re catalyzing conversation through Tech Pulse and internal dialogue, deploying modern tooling from agentic coding to prototyping and workflow automation, training our team via hands-on skill training and hiring for AI fluency, and aiming high, building the most AI-forward team on the East Coast. We don’t host events for the sake of networking. We’re also working hard to connect all of the other AI @ Work teams together.
Q: What is the Boston AI Coalition?
A: It’s an emerging coalition of Boston’s growth-stage and public companies with three aims: holding regular conversations on AI’s workplace, product, and societal impact; building in public via hackathons and collaborative sessions; and connecting operators across companies to solve big problems together, accelerating the East Coast AI ecosystem. We’ll be announcing more details about this group in the coming months as we kick things off. Stay tuned.