A post-80s college dropout has built the second unicorn.
A Swede who started his career with music streaming has stepped into the physical examination sector.
Recently, health tech company Neko Health has closed a $700 million Series C funding round, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners, with existing shareholders including General Catalyst, Atomico, and Lakestar continuing to increase their stakes. Prior to this, many figures from other fields had already crossed over into this sector, including Mark Zuckerberg, Maria Sharapova, Thierry Henry, among others. This marks the company's third financing completed within three years, with the pace accelerating continuously. The co-founder of the company is the very person who built the world's largest music streaming platform — Daniel Ek. From algorithm-driven recommendations through headphones to human body data captured by scanners, this cross-sector transition is gaining significant attention from the capital market.
The Newly Minted Unicorn
A single funding round has brought a Swedish health tech company into the public spotlight.
Recently, Neko Health completed its $700 million Series C financing. This round was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners, with all existing shareholders including General Catalyst, Atomico, and Lakestar participating in the follow-on investment, alongside new investors such as Liberty City Ventures, BDT&MSD, and Positive Sum. David Ofer, Managing Partner of O.G. Venture Partners, will also join the company's board of directors.
What makes this financing a talking point is the caliber of the investor roster itself. It includes tech industry figure Mark Zuckerberg, tennis player Maria Sharapova, legendary footballer Thierry Henry, rapper will.i.am, best-selling author Tim Ferriss, and a group of other celebrities from the entertainment, sports, and venture capital circles. Putting all these names on a single investor list naturally draws widespread attention. It's worth noting that the vast majority of these investors do not have professional medical backgrounds. Their collective willingness to bet on a physical examination company's stock demonstrates that this industry is gaining recognition from an increasing number of people.
In terms of financing rhythm, Neko Health has taken a very steady path. The company closed a $65 million Series A round in 2023, followed by a $260 million Series B round in 2025, before reaching the current $700 million Series C. The financing amount has kept rising, and the scope of investors has gradually expanded from initial specialized institutional players within the industry to cross-sector giants and celebrity investors. Combined across the three rounds, the company's capital reserves are already very substantial.
Where should this sum of money be allocated? The company has laid out a clear direction. Part of the funds will be used to expand its business footprint from Europe to the United States, while the remaining portion will continue to be invested in the research and development of underlying technologies. Hjalmar Nilsonne, Co-Founder and CEO, stated in a release that the company set this goal when it opened its first clinic three years ago: to create a new medical service model that identifies and intervenes in health issues before people fall ill. He shared a detail that most of the company's members choose to return for a follow-up visit after their initial scan, and their health metrics show positive improvement after the second consultation.
Another highlight of this financing is that it takes place during a special period. In recent years, longevity tech and preventive medicine have drawn growing attention across the global capital market, with more investors shifting their focus from treating diseases to preventing them. The scale and lineup of Neko Health's latest financing, to a certain extent, reflect this prevailing trend. What has caught people's attention is the origin story of this company, which was co-founded by an entrepreneur from the music industry.
From Headphones to Scanners
To understand Neko Health, one cannot overlook its co-founder Daniel Ek.
This name is almost universally known in the tech industry. He is one of the founders of Spotify, and built the company into the world's largest music streaming service platform. Over the past two decades, it has become a remarkable case in the history of tech entrepreneurship. However, few people know that when Spotify reached its peak, Ek had already begun devoting massive energy to the healthcare sector.
According to reports, Ek expressed dissatisfaction with the operational efficiency of the traditional healthcare system long ago, noting that the system has somewhat "gone off track" — a point he has repeatedly mentioned in media interviews. Instead of stopping at complaints, he started reading a large number of medical journals, and used devices like Fitbit and Apple Watch to record his physical condition over extended periods. He viewed health management as an engineering problem that could be broken down for systematic research. When Spotify went public in 2018, it provided him with a larger platform to realize his long-held dream.
In the same year, he met his future business partner Hjalmar Nilsonne. Nilsonne was born into a family of doctors, and his previous entrepreneurial experience was mainly focused on energy data. The two shared the same vision of "reconstructing preventive medicine with technology", so they quickly reached a cooperation agreement, and Neko Health was born in Stockholm. In its early days, the company operated in a relatively low-profile manner, rarely giving media interviews. It dedicated four years to focused product R&D before opening its first clinic in Stockholm in 2023.
What Neko Health does is reinvent the entire physical examination experience. Its core product is a roughly 60-minute full-body checkup completed without using radioactive methods. During the process, it collects millions of data points via sensors and blood tests, covering skin conditions, metabolic status, stroke and cardiovascular disease risk factors, abnormal blood indicators, body fat percentage, and more. The scan results are available for review within minutes, followed by a face-to-face consultation with a doctor to help users understand the data and provide follow-up recommendations. The combination of massive physical examination data and real-time physician interpretation is what sets this company apart from ordinary physical examination centers.
Since its debut in 2023, Neko Health has developed at a rapid pace. Starting from Stockholm, its clinic network has expanded successively to London, Manchester and other locations in the UK. Following this financing, the company is extending its business to the US market for the first time, with New York City as its first target. For an enterprise that has existed for only about three years, with such rapid growth and the newly secured $700 million investment, the coming period will be a critical window for it to accelerate expansion and capture market share.
Daniel Ek's cross-sector move, to some extent, applies the proven methodologies he validated at Spotify to a completely different industry, using technology and data to redefine a field that once relied primarily on manual experience. How far this path can extend needs to be viewed against the broader backdrop of the entire preventive medicine sector.
The New Battlefield of Preventive Medicine
The story of Neko Health is just one part of a broader track — a facet of the current preventive medicine and longevity tech space.
In recent years, the world has shown tremendous interest in this sector. The logic is easy to understand: the traditional healthcare system has long been centered on treating diseases, intervening only after symptoms appear. However, a growing body of clinical data and public health research points to a consistent conclusion: most severe diseases can be detected at an early stage, and taking intervention measures at that point can drastically reduce intervention costs and lower treatment difficulty. This consensus has gradually permeated the mass consumer market, leading enterprises focused on early screening and health management to receive increased capital attention.
There are already several representative enterprises operating on this same track. Prenuvo specializes in full-body magnetic resonance imaging scans, combined with serum biomarkers to detect cancer, neurological disorders, musculoskeletal issues, and organ abnormalities. BodySpec takes a different approach, focusing on DEXA dual-energy X-ray scanning technology to measure metrics including muscle mass, visceral fat, resting metabolic rate, bone mineral density, and whole-body fat distribution. While each company has a different entry point, they all leverage more sophisticated imaging technology and data processing capabilities to transform physical examinations from a once-a-year routine into a long-term tracked, quantitatively managed health service.
There is a deeper underlying reason why this track attracts so much cross-sector capital. Previously, health examinations relied heavily on the experience of professional physicians. But with the advancement of artificial intelligence and sensing technology, massive volumes of health data can now be collected and analyzed more rapidly and standardized, making large-scale replication of this service possible for the first time. As a result, an increasing number of talents from the tech, entertainment, and sports sectors are willing to invest in such enterprises — not just because they see the value of a single physical examination service, but because they recognize the potential for the entire health management infrastructure to be reshaped.
From a broader perspective, the concept of "longevity tech" is gradually moving from a niche topic into the view of mainstream consumers. More people are willing to pay to understand their physical conditions, and treat health management as a long-term investment, rather than waiting until they get sick to seek medical treatment. This shift in consumption patterns has brought sustained growth momentum to the entire preventive medicine sector.
The significance of Neko Health's latest financing goes far beyond the growth story of a single company. It sends a clear signal that preventive medicine is rapidly evolving from a conceptual idea into a capital-backed business. As for how many cross-sector entrepreneurs like Ek will emerge on this track, and how many new business models will be created, the competition centered around the theme of "prevention" has only just begun.
This article is sourced from the WeChat Official Account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital), written by LYU Jingzhi, and published with authorization from 36Kr.