Daniel Ek’s body-scanning start-up raises $700mn for US push
Funding round sees Neko Health’s valuation jump fourfold to almost $7bn for Spotify founder
Mark Zuckerberg, Ari Emanuel and Maria Sharapova are among those investing $700mn into Daniel Ek’s body-scanning start-up Neko Health, as the Spotify founder prepares for rapid expansion across the US.
The funding round, which is led by Neko’s existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners and OG Venture Partners, values the eight-year-old Swedish company at almost $7bn, according to people familiar with the deal. That price tag marks a fourfold increase from $1.7bn in January 2025.
More than 100,000 people in the UK and Sweden have now taken one of Neko’s £299 preventive health checks, which use custom-built medical equipment to offer a full-body skin scan, blood analysis and in-person consultation.
Ek told the FT that the funding would accelerate a “very aggressive rollout plan of new clinics in both UK and the US” after receiving FDA approval for several of its products ahead of a planned launch in New York later this year.
“It’s really a lot of strength on the business side, the demand side and the product side that has led to this position,” Ek said, noting that all its clinics that are more than six months old are now profitable on a gross margin basis.
“Eighteen months ago [when it last raised funding] it was very promising but maybe didn’t have as many proof points. I think the proof points are here this time,” he added.
Bejul Somaia, global partner at Lightspeed, said the investment reflected his “higher conviction” that Neko has a “clear path to global scale”.
“The execution of the company has been very strong,” he said. “What we are betting on is the consumerisation of healthcare and people beginning to get more proactive in their health.”
Other high-profile names joining the round are footballer Thierry Henry, filmmaker Sir Matthew Vaughn and supermodel Claudia Schiffer, as well as Jimmy Iovine, the music industry executive who co-founded Beats, the headphones and music app developer that became Spotify’s biggest rival after its $3bn acquisition by Apple.
Ek co-founded Neko in Sweden in 2018 alongside entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, its chief executive. It spent several years developing its own medical imaging devices and sensors before launching its first clinic in Stockholm in 2023.
It recently added body composition scanning to measure metabolic risk, and a mobile app that allows customers to send data from health-tracking wearable devices such as Apple Watch, Oura ring or Whoop wristband ahead of their Neko consultation.
Despite opening several new facilities in the UK and Sweden that have helped increase its overall capacity fivefold in the last year, the company is still trying to work through a waiting list of hundreds of thousands of prospective customers.
Preparing to open its first clinics in the US has already taken Neko more than 18 months, echoing Spotify’s long path to winning record labels’ approval to launch there in 2011.
Ek, who stepped down as Spotify’s chief executive in January, said that he is using the music service’s playbook for international expansion, going from the relatively small market of Sweden to the UK before taking on the world’s largest healthcare market.
“Going from Sweden to the UK was probably 10 times the complexity,” Ek said of Neko’s growth. “Now we’re taking on another 10x which is the US, so it is a massive undertaking by the company.”
Neko’s funding comes as it races a growing number of well-funded rivals, as celebrities, athletes and social media influencers tout the benefits of preventive health scans.
Competitors include Texas-based Function Health, which last year acquired body scanning start-up Ezra and raised $298mn at a $2.5bn valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Redpoint, as well as Zac Efron, Matt Damon and Magic Johnson.
Another rival, California-based Prenuvo, whose $2,500 MRI scan has received endorsements from Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton, raised $120mn in 2024 and has recently expanded from North America to the UK and Australia.
Ek and Nilsonne said that Neko had originally planned to raise its next funding after launching in the US but its existing investors Lightspeed and OG pre-empted that round. That allowed Neko to focus its attention on bringing in more individual investors, including the tech moguls and sports stars that joined this round.
Businesses that have physical assets have become increasingly popular among tech investors, as the value of their software portfolios has been shaken by advances in AI.
Somaia said the Neko investment fits a thesis at Lightspeed, which is also an investor in Anthropic and SpaceX, to back companies “that sit at the intersection of AI and the physical world”, making them more resilient to competition.
Nilsonne said: “What people are recognising is that the organisations that are exceptional at combining AI and hardware are doing truly exceptional things . . . and Neko is maybe the only company that is doing that in healthcare”.