Neko Health raises $700M at reported $7 billion valuation for US expansion
Neko Health, the body-scanning startup co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek, closed a $700 million Series C today and plans to open its first US clinic in New York later this year. The round reportedly values the company at roughly $7 billion, according to unnamed sources cited by the Financial Times, though Neko did not confirm that figure. Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners led the raise, with new investors including Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Maria Sharapova, will.i.am, and Thierry Henry joining the cap table, The Verge and TNW reported today.
The size of the raise looks stranger against the sector backdrop. Total venture funding for preventive health screening companies fell roughly 75% year-over-year in the first half of 2026, dropping to around $118.85 million across the entire sector, Healthcare.digital reported today. Neko's single round is nearly six times that figure. Investors appear to be betting on a platform story rather than clinic revenue alone.
Demand and retention: what the numbers show
The foundation of Neko's investor case is straightforward. More than 100,000 people have completed a scan across eight clinics in the UK and Sweden, including four in London and two in Stockholm, and another 350,000 are registered or waiting for an appointment, The Verge and TNW reported today. "We've gone into markets where health care is free, and hundreds of thousands of people line up in a queue" to pay for a scan, Daniel Ek told the New York Times which is either proof of durable structural demand or evidence that wellness spending has become largely decoupled from clinical need, depending on how skeptical you want to be.
Each appointment runs around 60 minutes: a sensor-based physical exam paired with a blood test and a same-day physician consultation, screening for early signs of skin cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, TNW reported. UK pricing sits at £299; Sweden at 2,750 kronor, roughly $285, The Verge noted. US pricing has not been disclosed.
By September 2025, annualized recurring revenue had reached approximately $21.9 million, with 80% of members prepaying for their next annual scan, and the company had achieved clinic-level profitability, Healthcare.digital reported. Those figures come from Healthcare.digital's analysis, not from Neko directly, and are not independently verified. But if they are directionally accurate, they describe a business with genuine retention rather than a growing waitlist and little else.
The valuation history adds useful context. At its Series B in early 2025, the company was valued at $1.8 billion, roughly four times less than the reported current figure, TNW reported. That 2025 valuation already represented roughly 666 times trailing revenue at the time, Healthcare.digital noted. The current $7 billion figure, if confirmed, prices a US platform that does not yet exist, not the European clinics that do.
Technology and US regulatory position
Neko's scan uses a sensor-packed pod that captures millions of data points on skin, heart, and circulation, TNW reported. The physical exam uses more than 70 sensors and generates approximately 50 million data points and 15 gigabytes of structured clinical data per session, Healthcare.digital reported. Those figures have not been independently confirmed, but the data volume accumulated across 100,000 completed scans and a growing base of returning members is central to the argument that Neko is building something more than a clinic chain. Apply machine learning to longitudinal records across years of repeat visits and the platform argument becomes coherent even before clinical outcome trials conclude.
On the regulatory front, the company's Derma-2 skin-scanning system received FDA 510(k) clearance in May 2026, classified as a Class 1 adjunctive clinical tool, meaning it supports physician review rather than replacing it, Healthcare.digital reported. The company is also sponsoring the DermaFlow clinical trial, registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, aimed at generating peer-reviewed validation of the Derma-2's diagnostic performance. That clearance covers one device. The full regulatory scope of Neko's multi-sensor US offering has not been publicly defined, which matters for what the company can market and claim in an American clinical setting.
The clinical trial work buys scientific credibility. But the structure of the business, annual rebooking, no insurance dependency, proprietary longitudinal data, is what Lightspeed is actually underwriting.
Neko Health's New York expansion: what the US clinic launch will test
"With this round, we're taking that mission to the US for the first time," CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne said in the announcement, The Verge reported. A waitlist for New York is open; US pricing and a detailed rollout timeline have not been disclosed. The company plans to expand to other US cities after New York, though no specific markets have been named.
One outside analysis projected US pricing at around $500, Healthcare.digital reported. If that holds, Neko would sit well below its best-known competitors: Prenuvo charges $2,499 for a full-body scan; Ezra's offerings range from $899 to $3,999, RadiologyNews reported three weeks ago. Whether a $500 price point survives the higher operating costs of a US clinic is one of the open questions the New York launch will start to answer.
The clinical picture is less settled. Neko's longitudinal data indicates that 77% of returning members who had a serious condition flagged at their first scan had it under control by their second annual visit, Healthcare.digital reported. That claim has no published methodology or peer-reviewed confirmation behind it. A meaningful data point, but not evidence of population-level benefit.
The broader evidentiary challenge is not Neko's alone. A JAMA editorial from two radiologists, directed at the whole-body MRI sector rather than Neko specifically, argues that elective screening programs are more likely to trigger harmful downstream procedures than to save lives, RadiologyNews reported three weeks ago. The concern is concrete: 20-40% of such scans surface an incidental finding, which then drives cascading follow-up tests and interventions with no proven mortality benefit. No major medical society endorses elective full-body screening, and none of these services are covered by insurance. Neko's modality differs from MRI, and its price point is far more accessible, but it operates in the same evidentiary space: no strong independent trial has demonstrated that this type of screening reduces mortality or hospitalizations.
What New York will reveal
Neko enters the US with a more credible foundation than most preventive-scanning startups can claim at this stage: 100,000 completed scans, operating clinics across two countries, an FDA-cleared device, and pricing that significantly undercuts its best-known US competitors. Existing backers include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and actor Zoë Saldaña, The Verge noted, alongside the celebrity investors this round added.
The metrics worth tracking as New York opens: whether US pricing holds near the projected $500 mark or drifts higher under operational pressure; how many waitlist registrants convert to paying customers; whether the prepayment and return-booking rates observed in Europe carry over to an American market; what regulatory disclosures emerge about the full scope of what Neko can offer in US clinics; and whether the DermaFlow trial and future independent studies produce published outcomes data.
Venture funding is returning to wellness startups, driven by health-focused consumers willing to pay out of pocket for biometric monitoring they once could only access through a physician, the New York Times reported today. Neko is the clearest current expression of that trend. New York will start to show whether there is a durable business underneath the enthusiasm, or whether the evidence gap eventually catches up with the valuation.
