Neko, the body-scanning startup co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, snaps up $260M at a $1.8B valuation

Stockholm startup Neko Health has made a big bet on consumers wanting to learn about their state of health and how to prevent things going wrong. Now, investors are making a big bet on Neko.

The startup has raised a fresh $260 million in funding, a Series B that values Neko at $1.8 billion post-money, Read has learned exclusively.

Neko will be using the capital to break into new markets like the U.S.; continue developing its diagnostics, potentially with acquisitions; and to open more clinics in response to demand. With its waitlist now at over 100,000 people – up from 40,000 just a few months ago – Neko has scanned and evaluated 10,000 patients to date in clinics in Stockholm and its newer market of London.

“It’s very clear that there’s incredible demand for a different way of thinking about health care,” Hjalmar Nilsonne, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. He spoke to Read over a video link from New York, where he is working on laying the groundwork for setting up clinics in the U.S. market.

The U.S. is a priority, he said, because right now it accounts for the most people on its waitlist outside of Europe. “Of course, we want to come to the U.S. We think there’s a lot we could contribute to the ecosystem here, made possible by this funding round,” he added.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, a new investor in the company, is leading this Series B, with General Catalyst, O.G. Venture Partners, Rosello, Lakestar and Atomico participating. The round follows a Series A of $65 million in 2023 from Lakestar, Atomico, General Catalyst and Prima Materia, the investment firm co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who happens to be the other co-founder of Neko. Prima Materia also seeded Neko with its initial funding but is not an investor in this latest round.

The funding and Neko’s growth are coming at a time when demands are shifting in the world of healthcare.

Around the world, whether healthcare systems are state-backed or privatized, there’s been a rising focus on preventative healthcare to spot signs before they develop into problems, including to offset the costs of handling chronic and complex conditions in populations that are living longer than before.

Alongside that, there has been a massive injection of technology into the worlds of medicine and health: new devices, new insights, and applications powered by, for example, artificial intelligence are changing how doctors are interacting with patients, what they are able to diagnose, and what patients are looking for in a medical environment.

Not all of these advances are evolving seamlessly — very far from it — but they show few signs of going away, and Neko is playing into all of these changes.

The Neko Health experience involves a visit to a clinic — calm, futuristic, minimalist — where, for £300, a customer gets an hour-long exam based around proprietary hardware and software. That exam generates “millions of health data points,” Neko says.

Moles and other marks on your skin are detected and counted as part of a check for skin cancer; waist circumference, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, heart rate, grip strength and other parameters are measured and used to determine whether you are at risk of metabolic syndrome, stroke, heart attack, diabetes and more. The visit includes a consultation with a doctor and recommendations for follow-ups if needed.

Those follow-ups might come shortly after the initial visit — for example, further monitoring of blood pressure or heart activity — or it might be another full appointment the following year. Nilsonne said that currently 80% of its customers have rebooked and paid in advance for appointments in a year’s time.

Considering Neko is a company that has staked its whole ethos on the power of data and advance planning, it had a fairly random start in life.

It was co-founded back in 2018 after Ek reached out to Nilsonne over Twitter to chat about the state of the healthcare market in response to a tweet of Nilsonne’s. Neither have backgrounds in the field – Nilsson’s previous startup was in climate tech – but through ongoing conversations, early ideas for Neko began to form.

It took six years to bring together a team and work out Neko’s vertically-integrated approach. Even so, Nilsonne said that Neko went into the market hoping for the best but unsure if their idea would resonate; now, according to the company, demand exceeds capacity.

Looking ahead, along with building more clinics to take in more users, Neko is focused on R&D around its medical hardware and software.

It’s starting from a fairly low-tech baseline because of the costs until recently of building and owning medical devices. “The average ECG machine in primary care is 15 years old, meaning the software is 15 years old,” Nilsonne said. “We have a completely different model where we’re vertically integrated, meaning we make these devices, we make the software, and we have the clinic.”

He added that Neko’s aim is to have updates on a yearly cadence, bringing in more parameters to measure, and likely different tiers of service at different price points.

“The body scan today is kind of the iPod moment for Neko,” he said. “The iPod was an iconic product that people loved, and that was exciting. But no one today is using an iPod. It enabled Apple to invest in this incredible paradigm of hand held computational devices. So we very much see this as the beginning of a journey where we’re trying to contribute, you know, incredibly affordable, high quality preventative diagnostics, and every year we’re going to be able to do more and more with less and less.”

The funding round, he said, will “allow us to double down and really increase our investments in making the product better, which is ultimately about solving some of the core problems in health care.”

It will also give Neko a chance to put more space between itself and others looking at preventative healthcare opportunities, such as Zoi in France and Aware in Germany. The capital could also set it apart from efforts from public health services, such as the Health Check provided by the NHS in the U.K., which covers many of the same areas that Neko does.

Some weeks ago, I heard from one of Neko’s early backers that some of the most insistent waitlisters were investors who wanted to check out the company first-hand for the health of their bodies and of their funds.

It seems that getting Lightspeed off the waitlist quickly yielded a strong result. As part of this funding round, Lightspeed partner Bejul Somaia will join Neko’s board.