At a glance: Neko Health is a preventive health company that runs AI-powered full-body scans at fixed-location clinics. Co-founders: Daniel Ek (Spotify Executive Chairman) and Hjalmar Nilsonne (2018, Sweden). Funding: $700M Series C closed July 2026. Lead investor: Lightspeed Venture Partners. Co-lead: O.G. Venture Partners. Notable co-investors: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Tim Ferriss, Maria Sharapova, will.i.am. Post-money valuation: ~$7B. Members: 100,000+ (UK and Sweden). Waitlist: 350,000+. US expansion: Manhattan flagship clinic, later in 2026. Part of our AI industry reviews.
Preventive health has long been the province of elite executive physicals and boutique longevity clinics. Neko Health’s thesis is that it can productize and scale a version of that experience — not as a luxury service but as a standardized 60-minute protocol — by building proprietary AI-driven hardware and deploying it at clinic scale.
The $700M Series C, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a valuation of nearly $7 billion, is the largest signal yet that institutional capital believes the thesis.
The Founders and Origin
Neko Health was co-founded in 2018 by Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, the company exiting stealth mode in February 2023. Ek — best known as the co-founder of Spotify, where he transitioned from CEO to Executive Chairman effective January 1, 2026 — built the company alongside Nilsonne, who serves as Neko Health’s CEO, in Sweden.
The origin story matters for understanding the product’s architecture. Ek approached the problem the way a product engineer would: what is the most information you can extract from a human body in one hour, using non-invasive, radiation-free sensors, without requiring specialist appointments spread across multiple days and locations? The company spent years on proprietary hardware development before opening clinics.
The Scan: What Actually Happens
A Neko Health scan is a single 60-minute clinic visit that captures health data across multiple systems:
- Derma-2: skin health assessment using high-resolution stereoscopic imaging, FDA-cleared as an adjunctive telethermographic system
- Echo-2: cardiac screening combining a 12-lead ECG with an acoustic/mechanical cardiac sensor for echocardiogram-style imaging
- Spectrum-2: vascular and circulatory assessment, FDA-cleared as a tissue-saturation oximeter measuring blood oxygenation and circulation
All hardware is proprietary, radiation-free, and automated, capturing millions of health data points per visit. An on-site microfluidic blood lab processes venous samples within minutes, delivering panels such as HbA1c, C-reactive protein, and lipid profiles before the visit ends. The visit includes a clinician consultation, so members leave with their results explained rather than waiting for a follow-up appointment.
The system integrates natively with Apple Health, building longitudinal data records across visits.
Two outcomes Neko cites publicly: 75% of members pre-pay for a follow-up scan before leaving their first appointment — a retention metric that reflects satisfaction and perceived value. Separately, 75% of members who were flagged for severe findings are now reported as controlled or in good health at follow-up, a health outcome metric the company is beginning to use alongside the financial ones.
The Funding Round
The Series C was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with O.G. Venture Partners as co-lead. The round attracted a notable roster of individual investors: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Tim Ferriss, Maria Sharapova, and will.i.am — a mix of technology founders, health advocates, and cultural figures whose participation signals broad conviction in the preventive health thesis.
The valuation growth is striking. Neko Health was valued at $1.8 billion post-money in its $260M Series B, which closed in January 2025. The Series C values it at approximately $7 billion — roughly a 4x increase in about 18 months. That pace of valuation expansion, in the absence of a revenue multiple that has been publicly disclosed, implies significant growth in membership, waitlist, and clinic capacity over the period.
Tim Ferriss, one of the individual investors, described the product simply: “Simplicity scales: you get a high-definition map of your biology in less than 60 minutes, explained by an unhurried doctor, all in one location.”
The Member Base
Neko Health has 100,000+ members across its clinics in the UK and Sweden. It also carries a 350,000-person active waitlist — people who have expressed intent to join but for whom there is not yet clinic capacity. The ratio of members to waitlist is a useful signal of constrained supply rather than slack demand.
That supply constraint is what the $700M is largely being deployed to address. Scaling the physical clinic footprint requires capital — for real estate, proprietary hardware per location, staffing, and local regulatory approvals. The Manhattan flagship is the beachhead for a US rollout that, if the waitlist logic holds, begins with substantial pent-up demand.
The US Expansion
Neko Health is opening its first US clinic as a Manhattan flagship later in 2026, with waitlist members getting priority access to the new location. The US market is both the largest opportunity and the most complex regulatory environment the company has entered. American healthcare operates under a layered system of state licensure, insurance network constraints, and clinical workflow norms that differ substantially from the UK and Swedish markets Neko has scaled in.
The company appears to be entering as a self-pay premium service rather than pursuing insurance reimbursement coverage, which simplifies regulatory complexity and allows faster launch. Whether it eventually pursues reimbursement — the path that would allow genuine mass market penetration — is an open question.
The AI Layer
The “AI” in Neko Health’s offering is primarily diagnostic and longitudinal. Each scan generates millions of data points; the AI systems analyze patterns across those data points to flag findings, track changes across visits, and generate the structured report that the clinician reviews with the member.
The proprietary nature of Neko’s hardware — rather than deploying off-the-shelf imaging devices — gives the company control over the data format and the model training pipeline. That vertical integration is rare in health tech, where most players assemble existing diagnostic hardware and layer software on top.
Whether Neko’s longitudinal dataset, as it scales across hundreds of thousands of members and multiple markets, becomes a durable competitive asset is the long-term question. A dataset of full-body scans tied to health outcomes over years would be genuinely unusual — and potentially valuable to pharmaceutical research, insurance underwriting, or health system partners.
For now, the company is building that dataset while proving the clinic model can scale in the US market.