Spotify Founder's Neko Health Raises $700M Series C at $7B Valuation to Bring AI Body Scans to the US

In a funding environment where nine-figure health tech rounds have become almost routine, Neko Health’s $700 million Series C still stands out. The Swedish preventive health company — founded in 2022 by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, built around a proprietary full-body scan that takes 60 minutes and produces results in 48 hours — closed the round on July 15 at a valuation just under $7 billion. That’s a fourfold increase from the $1.7 billion valuation it carried after its Series B in January 2025.

The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by O.G. Venture Partners. The investor list reads like a who’s who of the technology and celebrity worlds: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan committed capital, as did Tim Ferriss, Maria Sharapova, will.i.am, and OpenAI. The combination of tech founders, venture capital, celebrities, and an AI company investing in a health startup captures something real about where preventive medicine sits culturally in 2026 — no longer a niche concern but a premium consumer category that the wealthy and the influential have organized around.

What Neko Actually Does

The core product is a 60-minute, highly orchestrated full-body scan that uses thousands of proprietary sensors developed in-house. The scan is automated to a remarkable degree — patients move through a clinical pipeline with minimal human interaction, guided by software rather than staff. Results are returned within 48 hours, surfacing detailed metabolic insights, cardiovascular risk factors, early cancer markers, and structural abnormalities that standard primary care appointments would rarely catch.

The important detail is that Neko builds everything vertically: the imaging hardware, the clinical software, the AI analysis layer, and the clinic footprint itself. This is a deliberate choice. Neko’s thesis is that the performance of a preventive scan is only as good as the weakest link in the chain — and that building on top of legacy medical equipment suppliers, third-party software, or generic lab services introduces precisely the quality variability that makes preventive medicine unreliable at scale. By controlling the full stack, the company can iterate on every component simultaneously.

The AI layer is the piece that scales. The scan hardware and clinic footprint are capital-intensive; the AI models that interpret scan data improve continuously as more patients move through the system. Neko has processed over 350,000 scans in Europe across its clinics in London, Stockholm, Hamburg, and several other cities. Each scan adds to a proprietary dataset that no competitor — including academic medical centers — can easily replicate.

The Numbers Behind the Hype

The $700 million round and $7 billion valuation are not built on speculation. Neko has disclosed enough operational data to make the growth story legible.

The company has a 350,000-person international waitlist — confirmed paying demand, not email sign-ups. Its European clinics have operated profitably on a per-clinic basis, demonstrating that the unit economics work at current pricing (approximately £1,200-1,500 per scan in the UK, with annual membership plans for repeat customers). The company has not disclosed total revenue, but at current scan volumes and pricing, the run rate is likely in the $150-250 million range.

The Series C capital is not going toward achieving profitability — Neko claims its existing European operations are already profitable at the clinic level — but toward funding the expensive process of entering the US market. Opening a first flagship clinic in Manhattan involves real estate, regulatory approval, equipment installation, staff training, and a US-specific marketing launch. Healthcare regulation in the United States is materially more complex than in Europe, which is one reason the company is treating its Manhattan opening as a deliberate, high-investment beachhead rather than a rapid rollout.

Why the US Now

The timing reflects a specific reading of the US consumer health market in mid-2026. Several converging trends have made the moment feel right to Neko’s leadership.

First, the preventive health narrative has gone mainstream in the US in a way that it hadn’t two years ago. Bryan Johnson’s longevity protocols, the wave of GLP-1 drugs normalizing active health management, and the broader availability of consumer health data through wearables have shifted the conversation from “treating illness” to “managing health as an ongoing project.” Neko’s product fits the latter frame precisely.

Second, the US lacks an established domestic competitor at the full-body preventive scan tier that Neko occupies. Concierge medicine practices offer some of this, but without Neko’s level of technological integration or scan comprehensiveness. Academic medical centers offer similar scan technology in research contexts but not as a consumer product with 48-hour turnaround. The market is not saturated.

Third, the waitlist itself validates demand. 350,000 people globally have signed up and paid, or committed to pay, for a Neko scan — a significant portion of them American. The company is not speculating about US demand; it has observable evidence of it.

The Investor Logic

For Lightspeed and its co-investors, the bet is on the structural shift in how wealthy consumers and their employers think about health. The US market for executive health programs, employer-sponsored wellness, and direct-pay medical services is large — estimated at over $50 billion annually for the premium segment — and largely served by fragmented, low-tech providers.

Neko’s pitch to enterprise buyers (employer benefit programs, insurance companies offering preventive incentives, private wealth management clients) is that its scan produces specific, actionable health data that reduces long-term claims costs and extends the productive years of high-value employees and clients. That’s a different kind of sales conversation than selling gym memberships or wellness apps.

OpenAI’s participation in the round is worth noting specifically. Sam Altman has been publicly interested in longevity and preventive medicine for years, and OpenAI’s investment suggests an interest in the intersection of AI and biological health data that goes beyond financial return. Neko’s dataset — 350,000 full-body scans, growing rapidly — is exactly the kind of multi-modal biological data that next-generation health AI models would need to become clinically useful.

What Comes After Manhattan

The immediate roadmap is a single Manhattan flagship, opening later in 2026. From there, the company’s stated intention is to expand across major US cities, building a clinic network that mirrors what it has built in Europe. The capital intensive-part of this — real estate, equipment, regulatory approval — will be funded by the Series C. The AI and software development required to adapt Neko’s models to American patient demographics, health records infrastructure, and clinical workflow requirements will be ongoing.

The longer-term opportunity that Neko is building toward, but rarely articulates directly, is the dataset. A company that has performed comprehensive full-body scans on millions of people — capturing high-resolution biological data across cardiovascular, metabolic, oncological, and musculoskeletal dimensions — possesses something that has never existed in medical history. The value of that dataset, both for improving Neko’s own clinical models and as a potential research partner resource for pharmaceutical and biotech companies developing AI-native drug discovery pipelines, is difficult to quantify but potentially enormous.

The $7 billion valuation already reflects some of that long-term optionality. Whether the market ultimately rewards it depends on whether Neko can execute on a Manhattan launch that generates enough US waitlist demand to justify the broader rollout — and whether the American healthcare system, with its distinctive regulatory and insurance dynamics, proves as receptive as the European markets where the model has already been validated.

For now, the $700 million round answers one question definitively: serious money thinks Neko’s bet is worth making.