Venture funding is flowing back into wellness start-ups as investors aim to capitalize on the legion of health-obsessed consumers tracking their biometric data with wearable devices — and willing to shell out for diagnostic tests once reserved for the doctor’s office.
Neko Health, the health tech start-up founded by Daniel Ek of Spotify and Hjalmar Nilsonne, a Swedish entrepreneur, is the latest beneficiary. The Stockholm-based company, which is aiming to crack the New York market in the coming months, announced a star-studded $700 million funding round on Wednesday.
The new funding will be used “to invest in the research and technology that make prevention possible at scale,” Mr. Nilsonne said in an interview.
The company, which operates eight clinics in Sweden and Britain and advertises its service as “a health check for your future self,” offers full-body diagnostic scans — plus a blood test. Its aim is to promote disease prevention and boost longevity rates. A Neko Health scan in Britain is priced at 299 pounds ($400), which the company believes makes its services accessible to more than just the affluent.
Scaling up has been a challenge for Neko Health. Of the more than 350,000 people who have signed up for a scan, or are on the waiting list to do so, just over 100,000 have gotten one.
But that hasn’t fazed investors.
Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners led the latest funding round, with a half-dozen other firms putting money in, too, including Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum and BDT & MSD Partners.
Neko’s new investors also include a number of prominent individuals in the worlds of business, tech and wellness — many of whom either have gotten a Neko scan or are in Mr. Ek’s social circle and have been following the company’s growth.
That group includes Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan; Tim Ferriss, the best-selling author and investor famous for helping to popularize the “biohacking” craze; and Jessie Inchauspé, the French biochemist known as the “Glucose Goddess” for turning glucose monitoring into a wellness trend.
Neko Health is now worth nearly $7 billion, DealBook hears, a roughly fourfold increase since its last round of fund-raising in January 2025.
The A-listers’ involvement is the latest sign of the growing buzz around the longevity start-up space.
“For more than 20 years, I’ve tracked every metric imaginable to optimize health and performance. It’s expensive, complicated and fragmented,” Mr. Ferriss said in an emailed statement. “I’ve invested in Neko because they offer beautiful simplicity, and only simplicity scales: You get a high-definition map of your biology in less than 60 minutes, explained by an unhurried doctor.”
Beyond the sector’s buzzy appeal, investors have been drawn to Neko Health because of its success breaking into markets where people don’t need to pay for health care but are still willing to spend on Neko’s services, Mr. Ek said in an interview.
Investors see that “we’ve gone into markets where health care is free, or perceived to be free, and hundreds of thousands of people line up in a queue” for a scan, he said. “That also captures the imagination.”
Thanks to social media and artificial intelligence, whole-body scans have taken off in recent years. Prenuvo and Ezra, two U.S. rivals, rely on established diagnostic technologies — such as M.R.I. machines — to help customers screen for disease. Influencers and celebrities have called those scans lifesavers.
Some in the medical field still question the effectiveness of the scans. But Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne say that as health care professionals — especially dermatologists and cardiologists — become more familiar with Neko Health’s technology, they have sought ways to work more closely with the company.
