Venture funding is returning to wellness startups as investors look to capitalize on the legion of health-obsessed consumers who track their biometric data with wearable devices and are willing to shell out money for diagnostic tests once reserved for the doctor’s office.
Neko Health, the health tech startup founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, a Swedish entrepreneur, is the latest beneficiary. The Stockholm-based company, which aims to conquer the New York market in the coming months, announced a star-studded $700 million funding round on Wednesday.
The new funds will be used “to invest in research and technology that make prevention possible at scale,” Nilsonne said in an interview.
The company, which operates eight clinics in Sweden and Britain and bills its service as “a health check for your future,” offers full-body diagnostic scans in addition to a blood test. Its goal is to promote disease prevention and increase longevity rates. A scan from Neko Health in Britain is priced at £299 ($400), which the company says makes its services accessible not just to the wealthy.
Expansion has been a challenge for Neko Health. Of the more than 350,000 people who have registered for an examination, or are on the waiting list to do so, just over 100,000 have had one.
But that hasn’t fazed investors.
Lightspeed Venture Partners and OG Venture Partners led the latest funding round, with half a dozen other companies also contributing money, including Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum and BDT & MSD Partners.
Neko’s new investors also include a number of prominent people in the business, technology and wellness worlds, many of whom have undergone a Neko scan or are in Mr. Ek’s social circle and have been following the company’s growth.
That group includes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; Tim Ferriss, 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 control into a wellness trend.
Neko Health is now worth nearly $7 billion, DealBook hears, a roughly fourfold increase since its last fundraising round in January 2025.
The involvement of the A-listers is the latest sign of the growing buzz around the longevity startup space.
“For more than 20 years, I have tracked every metric imaginable to optimize health and performance. It is expensive, complicated and fragmented,” Ferriss said in an emailed statement. “I invested in Neko because they offer beautiful simplicity, and only scales of simplicity: you get a high-definition map of your biology in less than 60 minutes, explained by a doctor without rushing.”
Beyond the attractiveness of the sector, investors have been attracted to Neko Health because of its success in breaking into markets where people do not need to pay for health care but are still willing to spend on Neko’s services, Ek said in an interview.
Investors see that “we have entered markets where health care is free, or perceived to be free, and hundreds of thousands of people are lining up” to get a scan, he said. “That also captures the imagination.”
Thanks to social media and artificial intelligence, full-body scanners have taken off in recent years. Prenuvo and Ezra, two American rivals, rely on established diagnostic technologies, such as MRI machines, to help customers detect diseases. Influencers and celebrities have called those scanners lifesavers.
Some in the medical field still question the effectiveness of the scans. But Ek and Nilsonne say that as healthcare professionals (especially dermatologists and cardiologists) become more familiar with Neko Health’s technology, they have looked for ways to work more closely with the company.
