Neko Health

Neko Health starts from a contrarian premise: most of medicine waits for you to get sick, and by then you are already losing. Daniel Ek, who built Spotify, and Hjalmar Nilsonne founded the company in Stockholm in 2018 to flip that order, using in-house sensors and AI to map millions of data points across your skin, heart, and blood in a single sub-hour visit, then handing the results to a doctor while you sit there.

Seven years in, that bet has real weight behind it. Neko raised $260M in early 2025 at a $1.8 billion valuation, runs clinics across Stockholm, London, Manchester, and Birmingham, and is opening its first US location in New York. It is hiring hard across engineering, clinical, and operations roles, more than half of them clinical, as it tries to turn preventive scanning from a novelty into standard care.

The core product is the Neko Body Scan: a roughly one-hour, non-invasive visit that captures skin, cardiovascular, and blood data using hardware Neko designs and builds itself in Stockholm. The pitch is speed and clarity, you get scanned, tested, and then sit with a doctor who walks through the findings on the spot, no waiting weeks for a letter.

What makes it more than a fancy check-up is the data. Each scan produces a dense, structured record that Neko can benchmark against other members and track year over year, so the second scan is worth more than the first. That longitudinal picture is the real asset, and it is what the company is quietly building toward.

Healthcare mostly reacts. Cancers, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic problems tend to get caught once symptoms arrive, which is often the expensive, dangerous, late stage. Neko's whole reason for existing is to move detection earlier for people who feel completely fine.

It tackles this with breadth and access: a broad sweep of the body in one sitting, priced and packaged so the general public can actually book it, rather than the narrow, specialist-by-specialist tests most people never get around to.

Today Neko is a consumer service aimed at health-conscious, asymptomatic adults who are willing to pay out of pocket to get ahead of their own risk. The 100,000-plus waitlist it drew in London says the appetite is real.

The company is also opening a second front. It is standing up a B2B motion in the UK, starting in Birmingham and Manchester, to sell scans to employers as a wellness benefit, which points at self-insured companies and benefits platforms as the next buyer.

Neko's edge is that it owns the whole stack, the scanning devices, the firmware, the algorithms, and the clinical workflow, rather than assembling off-the-shelf equipment. That vertical integration is what lets a clinical insight turn into a hardware change fast.

The platform keeps growing. In mid-2026 Neko added body composition (visceral and body-fat measurement from its own imaging) and wearables integration through an iOS app that pulls Apple Health data like sleep, steps, and heart rate variability into the scan. It is also testing a second-generation modular scan room designed to capture more signals and roll out to new locations faster.

Neko makes money the simplest way: members pay for the scan. In the UK an appointment runs about £300, and in Sweden roughly 2,750 kr (around $260), with a strong rebooking rate as members come back for their annual follow-up. The recurring, once-a-year cadence is what turns a one-off scan into something closer to a subscription in behavior if not in billing.

The emerging second line is B2B: selling scans to employers as a health benefit, which Neko is now piloting in the UK before scaling it as a global playbook.

Neko sits in the fast-growing preventive and longevity screening space alongside players like Prenuvo, Ezra, Function Health, and traditional executive health checkups, plus the default alternative of just going to your GP. Its answer to all of them is the same: purpose-built hardware and an integrated clinic, not a booking layer on top of someone else's MRI or a panel of mail-in blood tests.

The moat it is betting on is proprietary devices designed and assembled in-house, a low patient-per-doctor volume that keeps the visit unrushed, and a compounding longitudinal dataset that gets more valuable with every scan.

People who have done the scan tend to praise the experience itself: the calm, premium setting, the short wait on the day, the fast turnaround, and a doctor who actually explains what the numbers mean. For many the real payoff is emotional, a documented, expert read on their body that quiets health anxiety, with the included mole check singled out as a highlight.

The recurring criticism is value for money. Skeptics argue a chunk of what you get is already available through a GP, appointment availability can be tight, and some clinicians would like to see additions like bone-density screening. The sentiment is genuinely mixed: loved by people who want proactive reassurance, questioned by those who weigh it against cheaper standard care.

Neko became a unicorn in early 2025, raising a $260M Series B led by Lightspeed at a $1.8 billion valuation, after a $65M Series A in 2023. Total funding sits around $325M.

The backer list reads like a who's-who of European and growth tech investing, and the money is pointed squarely at two things: R&D on the next-generation scan and geographic expansion, most notably the US launch in New York.

Neko has the ingredients most health startups lack, proprietary hardware, deep funding, a loyal and growing member base, and a founder with a track record of building category-defining companies. The next chapters are a US launch that clears regulators, a second-generation scan room that scales to more locations, and a B2B channel that could turn employers into a volume buyer.

The open question is the one that decides everything: whether enough people, and eventually payers, treat a proactive full-body scan as something you just do, the way Ek once bet people would pay to stream music. If they do, the compounding dataset makes Neko very hard to catch.

Neko frames itself as a place where hardware, software, and medicine sit shoulder to shoulder, so a clinical insight can become a hardware iteration overnight. The mantra that shows up across its postings is "think in 10x, not 10%," paired with a member-first ethos and a stated commitment to work-life balance rather than burnout.

Engineering is distributed and hybrid, with hubs in Stockholm, London, and Berlin and staff spread across several European cities; software engineers get real flexibility while hardware and firmware folks come in more often to be near the devices. Teams run in small cross-functional groups on a bi-weekly cadence, with org-wide demos where calibration problems and infra wins get shared out loud. It is a regulated-medical-device shop, so quality, traceability, and standards like ISO 13485 are part of daily life, not an afterthought.

Neko posts salary ranges on a good share of its roles, spanning US dollars for its New York and US hiring and euros for European engineering, and it says pay is benchmarked through market research. Disclosed engineering bands run into the low six figures in both currencies, while senior operations leadership sits higher, and clinical and lab roles round out the mix from hourly to salaried.

Base pay is only part of the picture: US roles come with medical, dental, vision, life insurance, a 401(k), commuter benefits, and a complimentary full Neko scan for the employee and eligible family.

Neko operates as a medical-device manufacturer, which shapes everything from how it builds to how it handles data. Its roles repeatedly reference regulated frameworks, EU MDR, FDA 21 CFR, ISO 13485, ISO 14971, IEC 60601, and IEC 62304, and its labs run to ISO 15189-aligned, UKAS-facing quality standards, with US labs held to CLIA, CAP, and state requirements.

The company is registered in Stockholm, Sweden. Detailed legal-entity and data-processing specifics were not captured in this pass, since the site did not crawl, so the trust and privacy pages remain the authoritative source for exact terms.

Neko has stayed in the press through a steady run of expansion and product news. The $260M Series B and its $1.8B valuation drew the most coverage, followed by the London clinic launch and the company's push into the United States.

Most recently, in June 2026, Neko announced body-composition analysis and Apple Health wearables integration for the scan, its biggest product update yet.