Daniel Ek's body-scanning startup Neko Health raises 700 million dollars in new funding

Daniel Ek, the co-founder of Spotify, has a second company that has just raised 700 million dollars. Neko Health is a body-scanning startup offering full-body preventative health assessments using a combination of advanced imaging technology, sensors, and AI analysis. The new funding round, reported this week, pushes Neko into a valuation tier that makes it one of the most heavily funded health tech startups in Europe.

For anyone unfamiliar with Neko, the concept is worth explaining in some detail, because it is both more and less radical than it sounds depending on how you approach it. The core product is a roughly 60-minute, radiation-free full-body assessment that combines proprietary sensors, including more than 2,000 high-resolution skin images, an ECG and arterial measurements, with blood tests. The results are analysed by AI and reviewed by doctors, and the aim is to catch conditions early that might otherwise go undetected until they become serious.

The Case for Preventative Scanning

The pitch for this kind of service is straightforward, and in many respects compelling. Most serious diseases are significantly more treatable when caught early. Heart disease, many cancers, and metabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes all have early stages where intervention is cheap and outcomes are excellent, compared to late-stage treatment that is expensive, difficult, and often unsuccessful.

Traditional healthcare systems, particularly the NHS in the UK and similar structures in Europe, are not well-designed for comprehensive preventative screening of healthy-seeming individuals. They are designed to respond to symptoms. Neko is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for a different approach: routine, comprehensive baseline assessment that creates a personal health record over time, so changes can be detected quickly.

The company operates clinics in Stockholm, where Ek is based, and has expanded to London, Manchester and Birmingham. The 700 million dollar raise is earmarked for US expansion, starting with New York. At the current pricing of £299 per scan in the UK, reaching the kind of scale that justifies this valuation will require either significant price reduction or a move toward employer and insurer partnerships.

The Concerns Worth Taking Seriously

Full-body scanning as a consumer health product is not without controversy in the medical community. The core concern is overdiagnosis: when you scan healthy people comprehensively, you find things. Some of those findings represent genuine risks. Many of them represent incidental findings, benign variations in anatomy or physiology that would never have caused a problem but now generate anxiety, follow-up tests, and sometimes unnecessary interventions.

Radiological societies have repeatedly cautioned against whole-body CT scanning for this reason. Neko's approach is different from CT scanning, using non-ionising imaging methods that avoid radiation exposure, which addresses one safety concern. But the overdiagnosis problem is not purely about radiation. It is about the psychological and systemic consequences of finding things in bodies that were otherwise functioning perfectly well.

This is not an argument against Neko's model, but it is a legitimate question that the company needs to engage with seriously as it scales. The medical oversight layer in its current clinics appears thoughtful, but 700 million dollars worth of growth pressure can do strange things to quality controls.

Ek's Expanding Ambitions

Daniel Ek is not the first tech entrepreneur to become fascinated by health data as the next major platform opportunity. Google, Apple, and Amazon have all made substantial investments in this space. But Neko's focus on the physical, hardware-forward scan experience rather than wearable data collection places it in a somewhat different category.

The 700 million dollar raise also suggests that investors believe the Neko model has something that the wearables approach does not: the ability to capture deep physiological data that a smartwatch simply cannot measure. There is likely something to that. An annual Neko scan paired with continuous wearable monitoring could genuinely represent a meaningful improvement in how individuals understand their own health over time.

Whether that combination is worth 700 million dollars of growth capital is a question that the next few years of clinic expansion and outcome data will need to answer.

Key takeaways

• Neko Health, a body-scanning startup co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek, has raised 700 million dollars in funding.
• The company offers full-body preventative health assessments using advanced imaging technology, sensors, and AI analysis.
• The new funding round values Neko as one of the most heavily funded health tech startups in Europe.
• The core product is a roughly 60-minute, radiation-free body scan combining sensor data and blood tests, analysed by AI and reviewed by doctors.
• Traditional healthcare systems are not well-designed for comprehensive preventative screening, making Neko's approach potentially compelling.
• The company's aggressive expansion plans may require significant price reduction or partnerships with employers and insurers.