Analysis
Neko Health's long-promised US expansion has a date and an address: September 24, at 300 Lafayette Street in SoHo, TechCrunch reported. More than 25,000 New Yorkers have already joined the waitlist.
The company was co-founded by Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, who runs it as CEO. Neko built proprietary full-body scanning hardware and pairs the scan with bloodwork and data pulled from fitness wearables to produce a health assessment. It has operated in the UK and Sweden to date. When it raised a $700 million Series C last month, the company said 100,000 people had been scanned.
A Crowded Field of Body Scanners
The preventive-scanning category has filled in quickly, and mostly with tech money rather than health-system money. Function Health, co-founded by wellness podcaster Dr. Mark Hyman, started with blood testing and added body scans by acquiring Ezra; it recently took a $450 million loan from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, a structure repaid through profit-sharing rather than equity dilution. Fountain Life, backed by Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis, sells scans and longevity assessments. Midjourney -- yes, the image model lab -- is building a body scanner it plans to fold into a spa experience opening in San Francisco in 2027.
New York is a deliberate first market: dense, affluent, insurance-agnostic for cash-pay wellness, and full of the exact demographic that will pay out of pocket for a scan their physician did not order. It is also the toughest regulatory and real estate environment in the country for anything adjacent to diagnostics, and the clinical debate about whole-body screening in asymptomatic adults -- false positives, incidental findings, downstream imaging costs -- has not been settled by any of these companies raising money.
The business model question underneath all of this is whether preventive scanning is a consumer subscription or an episodic purchase. Neko charges per scan in its existing markets, which makes it episodic, and episodic health purchases have historically been terrible businesses -- high acquisition cost, no recurring revenue, and demand concentrated among the worried well who need it least. Function Health's answer was to build a membership with recurring bloodwork, which is why it could raise $450 million in a structure repaid from profit-sharing rather than dilution.
Neko's $700 million Series C last month priced the company on the assumption that scanning volume scales like software. It does not: each location needs real estate, licensed clinical staff to interpret results, and hardware that serves a finite number of people per day. Scaling means opening clinics one at a time, which is a physical rollout with physical margins. That is a solvable business, but it is a different business than the valuation implies, and New York will be the first market where American cost structures test it.
The number that will decide whether the $700 million was well spent is not the 25,000 waitlist signups. It is repeat rate: how many of those New Yorkers book a second scan twelve months later at full price. Ek remains Spotify's CEO while chairing Neko, and the company has not disclosed US pricing, which in the UK runs several hundred pounds per scan and will almost certainly be higher in Manhattan.
