Recently on the litigation side of things is a lawsuit from screenless health tracker company Whoop, which is suing the maker of a health app called Bevel, alleging it is copying core parts of Whoop’s brand. Below is a video of Bevel CEO Gray Nguyen talking about the lawsuit.
@whoop Just filed a case against us.
A $10 billion company with 800+ employees is afraid of us, a team of 20 making health tracking accessible to everyone.
Instead of focusing on product and innovation, Whoop has decided to use its newly raised capital on legal expenses.
In this video, I… pic.twitter.com/gpi6AUpc40
– Gray (@greyngyen) 3 April 2026
Obviously, the details are perfectly legal bugs, but the suit focuses on something called “trade dress,” which is legal terminology that refers to the way a product looks and feels — which is what Whoop claims Bevel is copying. For the record, Bevel doesn’t make hardware like Whoop, but it does offer an app that’s meant to crunch data from health wearables and provide insights on sleep, exercise, stress, and more. While Bevel doesn’t integrate with Whoop, it does use data from the Apple Health app, where Whoop’s band data is stored.
There are a number of ways you can look at the lawsuit, but one thing is abundantly clear, and that’s the fact that Whoop (which just announced it raised $575 million in capital this week) isn’t exactly excited about its new competition — and that’s not just ruffling Bevel’s feathers. In October, Whoop also sued Polar, which makes its own version of screenless fitness wearables. As you might expect, the complaints are similar to those made against Bevel. Whoop alleges that the Polar Loop copies key parts of Whoop’s design and is tantamount to infringing its hardware patents.
Polar Loop for the record, Is Similar to Whoop in that it tracks a lot of the same metrics, looks similar, and is also tied to an app. To make matters worse for Whoop, it’s also cheaper and doesn’t require a monthly subscription, making it an attractive competitor in this area if you want to save some money and don’t mind going with a lesser-known brand.
It’s up to a judge to decide whether one of Whoop’s competitors is actually infringing the patent, but for consumers, the immediate results may not be good. Think about it, if you’re a health-tracking startup looking to break into this space, do you really want to move forward knowing that Whoop is waiting there with a team of lawyers? If you have the resources and the patience, maybe you should, but I’m assuming that startups working in this space will think twice if they smell litigation in the air.
Then the possible outcomes of lawsuits have to be considered. What if the court determines that companies like Polar and Bevel Did Infringement of Whoop’s patent? This could mean that both of those brands would have to either kill their products or make drastic changes to them in a way that defeats the purpose. These are hypothetical, of course, but in a world of fallout from litigation, they are a real possibility.
Health wearables are also part of the equation. Similar lawsuits have arisen in the smart glasses space, although in this case, it’s not a big name pointing the finger at a little guy; Everyone is pointing fingers at Meta. Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts in the smart glasses space have already drawn the ire of companies who have claimed Meta stole his ideas to create various aspects of its Ray-Ban-branded smart glasses.
While Solos, a competing smart glasses company, is alleging that Meta stole parts of its smart glasses technology, including audio and processing, to create the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, a company called Perceptix Technologies is alleging that Meta is infringing on its patents surrounding electromyography (EMG) devices. For reference, Meta’s Neural Band, a muscle-reading wristband that can be used to control the Meta Ray-Ban display with finger/hand movement, uses EMG to do so. Perceptix Technologies holds a patent on similar EMG devices.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of finger-pointing being done in the wearables sector at the moment, and it’s not just people trying to get their increasingly unwanted smart glasses to take pictures. Such lawsuits are generally not resolved overnight—patent litigation can take years, especially at the higher levels. However, when/if they come the consequences could be significant. Although Meta likely won’t stop selling smart glasses even if it loses in court, companies like Bevel and Polar may not have the same immunity. Whatever happens, I wouldn’t expect wearables to get less spicy any time soon; For large-scale companies, lawsuits are a small price to pay when faced with the prospect of capturing a new market.
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