A cylinder, seventy sensors, and a doctor waiting on the other side

Take off your clothes, put on a robe, and stand still inside a rotating scanner for a few minutes. That is the entire physical experience at the center of Neko Health, the Stockholm-founded preventive health company built by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek and entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, who serves as Neko's CEO while Ek chairs the company. There is no waiting room in the traditional sense — the space is designed to feel closer to a spa than a hospital corridor, and that design choice is not incidental. It is the product.

What the scanner actually measures

The company was founded out of Sweden in 2018 by Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, and it stayed in stealth for years before opening its first paid clinics. Inside the scanning chamber, the chamber itself is fitted with 70 sensors, including dozens of volumetric and other cameras, to produce a composite picture of you with 50 million data points. From there, a patient moves to an exam bed for blood pressure, eye pressure, and a grip-strength test, before a clinician draws blood — the only invasive step in the process. Unlike Prenuvo, which relies on whole-body MRI, Neko differs from other imaging startups such as Prenuvo in that it does not use MRI, instead deploying a radiation-free scanner that uses proprietary sensors to assess patient health. That distinction matters commercially: no MRI suite means lower capital cost per clinic and a shorter visit, which is central to how the company prices itself.

Funding, in order, with sources

Neko's capital raises are unusually well documented for a private European health startup. It raised €60 million ($65 million) in its first external round of funding in July 2023, a Series A led by Lakestar. It then opened in London in September 2024, charging £299 for an hour-long visit that produces "millions" of data points. Three months into 2025, the company closed a $260 million Series B, valuing it at $1.8 billion post-money, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. At that point, its own reporting put the waitlist at over 100,000 people, up from 40,000 just a few months earlier, against roughly 10,000 completed scans in Stockholm and London.

The bigger jump came in mid-2026. Neko raised $700 million in Series C funding at a nearly $7 billion valuation, a fourfold increase from its $1.7 billion Series B in January 2025, in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by O.G. Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Atomico, General Catalyst, and Lakestar. By that point the company had completed over 100,000 body scans across eight clinics in Sweden and the U.K., with 350,000-plus people on waitlists or registered. Weeks later, Neko opened its first U.S. office in New York, where it said more than 25,000 New Yorkers had already joined a waitlist.

What's confirmed, what isn't

This is the point at which a lot of coverage of fast-growing private health startups blurs company talking points with independent verification. Two categories are worth separating cleanly. The funding rounds, dates, lead investors, and valuation figures above are corroborated across multiple independent outlets and the company's own press releases, so they are treated here as established. The technical specifications — the sensor count, the volume of data points per scan, and the precision of mole-tracking between visits — originate almost entirely from company materials and repeated in press coverage; they describe what the machine is designed to do, not an independently audited clinical outcome.

A second, more important gap sits around outcomes. Neko has published a self-described second-year results summary from its Stockholm clinic reporting 54 life-saving diagnoses, while 215 people were cleared of any issues after follow-up testing — figures the company itself has flagged as "not a scientific study with a control group for comparison". That caveat should be read literally: it is a operating metric, not peer-reviewed evidence of a mortality or morbidity benefit.

The clinical argument against speed

The criticism aimed at Neko is the same one aimed at every consumer screening company in this category: catching more things also means flagging more things that turn out to be nothing. One UK screening researcher, cited in coverage of the sector, called this style of self-pay scanning "more likely a waste of money and time" for healthy, low-risk people, given the absence of published survival-benefit data. The American College of Radiology's position is blunter still: evidence is insufficient to recommend total-body MRI screening for asymptomatic people without risk factors, symptoms, or family history — a standard that, by extension, applies to the broader whole-body screening category Neko competes in, even though its own technology isn't MRI-based.

Where it sits next to Prenuvo, Ezra, and Function Health

Neko's closest comparables have moved fast in the opposite pricing direction. Prenuvo's flagship scan still runs at roughly $2,499 for its Comprehensive Whole Body MRI, while Ezra — now folded into Function Health after a 2025 acquisition — cut its entry price dramatically, with Function offering a $499 annual subscription covering more than 160 blood tests, alongside a 22-minute full-body scan for $499. Neko's own price, unchanged through its funding rounds, sits at £299 in the UK and 2,750 SEK in Sweden — closer to the low end of that range, and delivered in a single combined visit rather than a lab-membership model.

The Korea question is not about speed

South Korea already runs one of the world's more comprehensive national health-checkup systems, supplemented by large hospital-run comprehensive screening centers and private operators. A Neko-style clinic entering that market would not be competing on scan speed or novelty — Korean consumers are already used to routine, subsidized screening. The open space is what happens after the checkup: continuous tracking between annual visits, integration of scan data with wearables and lab results over time, and behavior-change coaching that turns a one-day result into an ongoing relationship. Any entrant pursuing that gap would also need to design carefully around Korea's Medical Service Act, which draws a firm line between licensed hospital diagnostics and non-medical wellness services — a boundary that determines what a scanning clinic is legally allowed to claim, and to whom.

What to check next

A handful of concrete, observable signals will say more than any pitch deck. Watch whether Neko publishes a peer-reviewed outcomes study, rather than self-reported clinic metrics, as its scan volume grows. Watch how many of its 350,000-plus waitlisted users convert into paying, repeat customers once capacity catches up with demand in New York and future U.S. cities. And watch whether regulators in the U.S. or any future Asian market require Neko's scanner to be classified and cleared as a medical device rather than marketed as a wellness service — a classification fight that has shaped, and constrained, every company in this category before it.