Wearable clothing startup Athos raises $35.5M led by Chamath Palhapitaya's Social+Capital, bringing total it has raised to $51M
Sarah Buhr / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Athos' $35.5M round lands in the middle of a funding wave for body-sensing wearables: within two years, Thalmic Labs would pull in $120M from Intel and Amazon for its gesture-control armband, and Boston rival Whoop would reach roughly $50M total raised for its biometrics wristband — nearly identical cumulative capital on a different form factor.
The investor matters as much as the round: Social+Capital under Chamath Palihapitiya later institutionalized this style of concentrated bets, raising $600M through an IPO'd holding company to keep backing startups outside the normal VC cycle.
First-order effects
- Athos gains the largest single tranche of its $51M raised, giving it runway to push sensor-embedded training apparel into a market where Whoop is chasing the same athlete-biometrics customer with comparable funding.
- Social+Capital takes a lead position in smart clothing, adding a hardware-and-data play to its portfolio alongside its software investments.
Second-order effects
- Strategic and growth investors are forced to price body-sensing startups higher: Thalmic Labs' $120M round from Intel and Amazon shows corporate buyers willing to pay well above Athos' Series-level checks for adjacent wearable technology.
- Apparel-industry infrastructure players get pulled into the orbit — NewStore's $50M raise explicitly targeting apparel and lifestyle brands signals that retail software sees connected clothing as a channel worth arming.
Third-order effects
- If the funding cadence holds, consumer biometrics hardware consolidates around a few heavily capitalized players per form factor, squeezing out sub-scale entrants who cannot match eight-figure rounds just to stay in the data-collection race.
- Investors like Social Capital keep building new vehicles — culminating years later in Palihapitiya personally taking a CEO seat at an operating company — blurring the line between backer and operator for capital-intensive hardware bets.
The trend: Venture capital is treating body-sensing wearables as a platform category where whoever owns the athlete health-data layer wins, driving escalating rounds across competing form factors.