Venture funding is pouring back into wellness start-ups as investors aim to take advantage of the legion of health-obsessed consumers tracking their biometric data with wearable devices — and willing to pay for diagnostic tests once they’re booked into the doctor’s office.
Neko Health, the health technology start-up founded by Daniel Ek of Spotify and Hjalmar Nilsonne, a Swedish entrepreneur, is the latest recipient. The Stockholm-based company, which aims 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 research and technology that makes prevention possible at scale,” Mr. Nilsonne in an interview.
The company, which operates eight clinics in Sweden and the UK and advertises its service as “a health check for your future self”, offers full-body diagnostic scans – plus a blood test. The aim is to promote disease prevention and increase life expectancy. A Neko Health scan in the UK is priced at 299 pounds ($400), which the company believes makes its services accessible to more than just the wealthy.
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 a waiting list for it, well over 100,000 have had one.
But that hasn’t worried investors.
Lightspeed Venture Partners and OG Venture Partners led the latest funding round, with half a dozen other firms also putting in money, including Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum and BDT & MSD Partners.
Neko’s new investors also include a number of prominent people in business, tech and wellness – many of whom have either had a Neko scan or are in Mr. Ek’s circle and have followed the company’s growth.
That group includes Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan; Tim Ferriss, the best-selling author and investor famous for helping 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, roughly quadrupling since the last round of fundraising in January 2025.
The A-listers’ involvement is the latest sign of the growing buzz around the longevity startup space.
“For more than 20 years, I’ve been tracking every imaginable metric to optimize health and performance. It’s expensive, complicated and fragmented,” said Mr. Ferriss in an emailed statement. “I 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 a non-urgent doctor.”
In addition to the sector’s busy appeal, investors have been drawn to Neko Health because of its success in 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 are lining up” for a scan, he said. “It also captures the imagination.”
Thanks to social media and artificial intelligence, full-body scans have taken off in recent years. Prenuvo and Ezra, two US rivals, rely on established diagnostic technologies – such as MRI machines – to help customers screen for disease. Influencers and celebrities have called these scans lifesavers.
Some in the medical field still question the effectiveness of the scans. But Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne say that as healthcare professionals — particularly dermatologists and cardiologists — become more familiar with Neko Health’s technology, they have sought ways to work more closely with the company.
