Analysis
Neko Health, the full-body scanning startup co-founded by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, has officially launched in the United States, TechCrunch reported, after opening its first American location in SoHo, Manhattan in late September. The move marks Neko's entry into the world's largest healthcare market after building its initial customer base in the UK and Sweden.
From Stockholm to SoHo
Ek co-founded Neko in 2023 with Hjalmar Nilsonne, who serves as the company's CEO, pairing proprietary body-scanning hardware with bloodwork and wearable-device data to screen for early signs of disease. The company has raised roughly $1 billion in total funding, including a $700 million Series C that closed over the summer, and TechCrunch's prior coverage of Neko's US expansion -- documented on Neko's Pulse company hub -- noted more than 100,000 people had already completed a scan.
“The US healthcare system is a genuinely different animal than the UK's NHS-adjacent ecosystem or Sweden's public system, where Neko built its reputation.”
Neko is entering a US market with several comparable players already established:
- Function Health: a US-based preventative diagnostics startup offering lab-panel-based health screening, reached a multi-billion-dollar valuation in 2025 and already operates at scale domestically -- Neko's most direct US competitor on the "know your body before something goes wrong" pitch.
- Prenuvo: a full-body MRI scanning startup already operating multiple US clinics, Neko's closest apples-to-apples competitor on scanning technology specifically, though Prenuvo relies on MRI machines rather than Neko's proprietary scanning pods.
- Forward Health: the membership-based primary care and screening startup that scaled a tech-enabled preventative care model in the US before winding down its physical clinics in 2025, a cautionary comp for capital-intensive health retail.
At $500 per scan with no insurance coverage, Neko is pricing itself as a cash-pay product, cheaper than Prenuvo's roughly $1,000-$2,500 full-body MRI pricing but still an out-of-pocket purchase. With a global waitlist above 300,000 people against roughly 100,000 completed scans to date, Neko has far more demand than throughput -- the US launch is as much about adding capacity as opening a new market.
Preventative, cash-pay health screening has become one of the more durable consumer-health investment theses to come out of the pandemic, and Neko's near-$1 billion in total funding puts real pressure on US-native competitors to show comparable unit economics. Investors comparing Neko to Function Health and Prenuvo should look past headline valuations to throughput per location -- Neko's European numbers suggest scan capacity, not customer acquisition, is the bottleneck.
The US healthcare system is a genuinely different animal than the UK's NHS-adjacent ecosystem or Sweden's public system, where Neko built its reputation. American consumers are already fatigued by out-of-pocket healthcare costs, and a $500 scan with no clear path to insurance reimbursement is a tougher sell against rising deductibles, not an easier one. Neko's waitlist numbers also come from Europe; it has no track record yet of converting American demand into US customers at the same rate.
One Manhattan office does not make a US rollout. The number to watch is how fast Neko adds a second and third US location, and whether throughput per site in New York matches what it's achieved in London and Stockholm.