Neko Health has raised $700 million in a Series C round that values the body-scanning startup at approximately $7 billion, according to unnamed sources cited by the Financial Times and reported by The Verge. The round arrives ahead of the company's first US clinic opening, planned for New York in 2025.

The jump in valuation is steep by any measure. Neko Health closed a $260 million Series B in early 2025, led by Lightspeed, at a $1.7 billion valuation (Neko Health; FT). The new $7 billion figure represents roughly a fourfold increase in under two years.

Neko Health was founded in 2018 by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek and launched publicly in 2023. Co-founder and CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne runs day-to-day operations. The company builds custom medical scanning hardware and uses AI-based analysis to screen for skin cancer, heart disease, and diabetes risk factors, combining full-body scans with blood tests in a single visit.

The Series C investor list reads like a cross-section of celebrity tech-adjacent capital rather than a traditional healthcare cap table. New backers include will.i.am, Maria Sharapova, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Thierry Henry, joining existing investors Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and actor Zoë Saldaña. That roster is notable less for its check sizes — undisclosed — than for what it signals about how consumer-health startups are courting distribution through celebrity affinity rather than pure clinical credentialing.

Neko Health currently operates eight clinics across the UK and Sweden: four in London, two in Stockholm, and additional locations rounding out the network. Scans cost £299 in the UK and 2,750 Swedish kronor in Sweden. The company reports more than 350,000 people have joined waitlists or registered for a scan, with 100,000 scans completed to date. A waitlist for the New York location is already open on the company's website. US pricing has not been disclosed.

The US expansion tests whether Neko's model — cash-pay, direct-to-consumer preventive screening built around proprietary hardware — can clear the regulatory and reimbursement thickets that have slowed other diagnostics-adjacent ventures stateside. The UK and Sweden operate under different regulatory regimes for consumer health screening than the US, where FDA classification of scanning devices, state-level medical licensing, and the absence of insurance reimbursement for elective preventive scans all shape unit economics differently than in Neko's home markets. None of this has been detailed publicly by the company, and the Verge report does not specify which regulatory pathway Neko's US devices will follow.

The broader context here is the maturing of a category — consumer-facing preventive diagnostics powered by machine-learning image analysis — that has attracted capital cyclically since wearable-adjacent health tech first drew venture interest a decade ago. Neko's pitch sits adjacent to full-body MRI startups like Prenuvo, though its scanning modality and equipment are proprietary rather than adapted from existing imaging hardware. The distinction matters for regulatory classification and for how insurers and clinicians eventually treat the outputs.

Worth flagging: valuations built substantially on a single Series round with limited disclosed revenue metrics warrant scrutiny independent of investor prestige. Celebrity-backed rounds have, in prior cycles — from wearables to at-home genetic testing — sometimes outpaced the underlying clinical validation and reimbursement clarity needed to sustain them at scale. Nothing in the available reporting indicates that dynamic is at play here, but the pattern is one worth watching as Neko scales into a market with far more fragmented and litigious regulatory exposure than the UK or Sweden.

What Neko is betting on, ultimately, is that AI-assisted screening at consumer price points can shift preventive health from an occasional clinical event into something closer to routine maintenance — a proposition that, if the underlying detection accuracy holds up under US regulatory review, could meaningfully widen access to early screening beyond populations who already see specialists regularly. Whether the New York clinic validates that bet, or exposes the limits of exporting a Nordic-and-UK operating model into US healthcare economics, will be one of the more closely watched tests in consumer health tech this year.