Wearables are an thrilling house proper now. You’ve obtained all sorts of smart rings, fitness trackers, smart glasses, weird, useless pins stuffed with AI—you identify it. You even have, because of all that fascinating innovation, fairly a number of lawsuits.
Most lately on that litigious aspect of issues is a lawsuit from screenless well being tracker firm Whoop, which is suing the maker of a health app called Bevel, alleging that it’s copying core components of Whoop’s model. Under is a video of Bevel CEO, Gray Nguyen, talking about the lawsuit.
@WHOOP simply filed a lawsuit towards us.
A $10B firm with 800+ workers is terrified of us, a 20-person crew making well being monitoring accessible to all.
Moderately than focusing on product and innovation, Whoop has determined to use its newly raised capital on lawfare.
On this video, I… pic.twitter.com/gpi6AUpc40
— Gray (@greyngyen) April 3, 2026
Clearly, the details are a complete can of authorized worms, however the go well with facilities on one thing referred to as “commerce costume,” which is authorized terminology that refers to the approach a product appears and feels—it’s that je ne sais quoi that Whoop claims Bevel is copying. Bevel, for the file, doesn’t make {hardware} like Whoop, however it does supply an app that’s meant to crunch the information from well being wearables and supply insights on sleep, train, stress, and extra. Whereas Bevel doesn’t combine with Whoop, it does use information from the Apple Well being app, the place information from Whoop’s band is saved.
There are quite a lot of methods you may take a look at the lawsuit, however one factor is abundantly clear, and that’s the undeniable fact that Whoop (which simply introduced that it raised $575 million in capital this week) isn’t precisely pumped about its newfound competitors—and it’s not simply Bevel ruffling its feathers. In October, Whoop also sued Polar, which makes its personal model of screenless health wearables. The complaints, as you may count on, are related to these made towards Bevel. Whoop alleges that the Polar Loop copies key components of Whoop’s design and that the {hardware} is tantamount to patent infringement.
The Polar Loop, for the file, is related to Whoop in that it tracks quite a lot of the identical metrics, appears related, and is additionally linked to an app. To make issues worse for Whoop, it’s additionally cheaper and doesn’t require a month-to-month subscription, making it an attractive competitor in the house in the event you’re wanting to avoid wasting cash and don’t thoughts going with a lesser-known model.
Whether or not both of Whoop’s opponents is really infringing on patents is one thing for a choose to determine, however for shoppers, the fast outcomes may not be nice. Give it some thought, in the event you’re a health-tracking startup wanting to carve out a distinct segment in the house, do you actually need to rush forward understanding rattling effectively that Whoop is ready there with a crew of attorneys? Possibly you do, in the event you’ve obtained the sources and grit, however I’m going to assume that startups working on this house will assume twice with the scent of litigation in the air.
Then there’s the potential fallout from lawsuits to contemplate. What if the courtroom determines that corporations like Polar and Bevel did infringe on Whoop’s patents? That would imply each of these manufacturers find yourself both having to intestine their merchandise or drastically change them in a approach that defeats the function. These are hypotheticals, in fact, however in the pantheon of outcomes stemming from a lawsuit, they’re an actual risk.
Well being wearables are solely part of the equation, too. Comparable lawsuits have bubbled up in the sensible glasses house, although on this case, it’s not an enormous identify pointing the finger at a bit of man; it’s everybody pointing the finger at Meta. Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts in the sensible glasses house have already drawn the ire of corporations claiming Meta stole their concepts to make varied points of its Ray-Ban-branded smart glasses.
Whereas Solos, a competing sensible glasses firm, is alleging that Meta stole parts of its smart glasses technology, together with audio and processing, to create the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, an organization referred to as Perceptix Applied sciences is alleging that Meta is infringing on its patents round electromyography (EMG) gadgets. For context, Meta’s Neural Band, the muscle-reading wristband that can be utilized to management the Meta Ray-Ban Display with finger/hand motions, makes use of EMG to accomplish that. Perceptix Applied sciences holds patents on related EMG gadgets.
Unnecessary to say, there’s quite a lot of finger-pointing taking place in the wearable house proper now, and it’s not simply folks attempting to get their increasingly unwelcome smart glasses to take an image. Lawsuits like this usually don’t shake out in a single day—patent litigation can take a number of years, particularly at a excessive degree. The results might be vital, although, when/in the event that they do arrive. Whereas Meta probably received’t cease promoting sensible glasses no matter whether or not it loses in courtroom, corporations like Bevel and Polar might not have the identical immunity. No matter occurs, I wouldn’t count on wearables to get any much less spicy quickly; for corporations of scale, lawsuits are a small worth to pay when the prospect of cornering a brand new market is on the desk.
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