OneTeam Collective, the NFLPA's business accelerator arm, has formed a partnership with wearable tech company Whoop in which it will receive a minority stake in the company. Whoop will become the official licensed recovery wearable of the NFLPA as part of the deal. It is the first agreement by OneTeam Collective, which the union formed late last year with founding partners Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Madrona Venture Group, Intel, LeadDog Marketing Group, the Harvard Innovation Lab and the soon-to-launch Sports Innovation Lab to invest in companies. As part of the deal, every NFLer will get a sensor wristband that measures the user's heart rate that they can use at home, said NFL Players Inc. President Ahmad Nassar. "Our players right now, they are training, they are home, they are doing their offseason workout programs and that is where the value of them wearing this comes in -- they can calibrate what they are doing,” he said. Nassar declined to reveal the financial details of the NFLPA's investment in Whoop. Nassar: "They make money by selling the device. We make money because we invested in Whoop and so our fortunes are rising with the company’s fortunes and we are hopeful that our deal will sell more straps. And we are going to do some interesting things in support of that. We have some revenue shares as part of it.” Plans to market the partnership have not yet been finalized, he said.
