Neko Health Raises $700m for AI Body Scans — What UK Users Should Know
Neko Health raised $700m and already runs four London clinics at £299 a scan. Here is what UK readers should know before booking.
A Spotify billionaire’s body-scanning clinic just raised $700 million to conquer America. What most coverage of that story is missing: Neko Health already has four clinics running in London, with Manchester and Birmingham next. This isn’t a “coming soon to the UK” story. It’s already here, and the American cash pile changes what happens to it.
What Is Neko Health?
Neko Health was founded in 2018 by Daniel Ek — the Spotify chief executive — and Hjalmar Nilsonne, first launching its body-scanning clinic in Stockholm. The pitch: a single 60-minute appointment that combines full-body imaging, blood tests, an ECG, and a consultation with an in-house GP, aimed at catching health problems before symptoms show up.
The company opened its first London site in Marylebone in 2024. Since then it’s added Spitalfields, Covent Garden, and Victoria clinics. The Spitalfields location is the company’s largest yet — a standalone 7,466 square foot building built to scan up to 30,000 people a year. That’s a serious amount of infrastructure for a “wellness startup,” closer in scale to a small private hospital than a pop-up health kiosk. Beyond Stockholm and London, Neko has opened clinics in other European cities as it builds out a continent-wide network, with the New York site marking its first step outside Europe entirely. UK investors keep asking me whether this kind of rapid multi-city rollout is sustainable for a company still years from profitability — the honest answer is nobody outside Neko’s own finance team knows yet, and $700 million buys a lot of runway to find out.
How the AI Body Scan Works
Strip away the marketing and the mechanics are genuinely interesting. Customers get more than 2,000 high-resolution images taken to map their skin, alongside geothermal and 3D photography, an electrocardiogram, arterial measurements, and body-composition analysis. Blood samples get processed on-site, so results come back during the same appointment rather than days later.
The scan screens for early signs of conditions including skin cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome risk factors. A clinician reviews the output and talks you through it in person. Specialist dermatologists and cardiologists get looped in when something needs a closer look, with referral letters provided when appropriate.
Worth being precise here: most of these individual measurements — blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, ECG readings — already exist in conventional healthcare. Neko’s actual innovation is combining them into one appointment with automated data collection and AI-assisted image analysis, not inventing new diagnostic categories from scratch. The AI does the pattern-spotting across thousands of images and data points; the human clinician still makes the call.
The $700m Raise — Who’s Backing It
The Series C round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, co-led by O.G. Venture Partners, with existing backers Atomico, General Catalyst, and Lakestar returning. New names on the cap table include Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD.
The celebrity angle is what got headlines, and fair enough — the round included personal investment from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, plus former tennis world number one Maria Sharapova. That takes Neko’s disclosed funding since 2023 past $1 billion total, following a $65 million Series A and a $260 million round in January 2025.
David Ofer of O.G. Venture Partners joins Neko’s board, pending regulatory approval. The fresh capital is earmarked mainly for the US push, starting with a New York clinic — but a company this well funded rarely leaves its existing markets standing still, which is exactly why the UK expansion news landed in the same news cycle. Manchester and Birmingham weren’t announced in isolation; they’re part of the same growth plan the $700 million is meant to accelerate globally.
Neko Health in the UK: Prices and Locations
A Neko scan in London currently costs £299, and the appointment runs about an hour including the GP consultation. Four sites are live — Marylebone, Spitalfields, Covent Garden, and Victoria — with Manchester and Birmingham confirmed as the next two UK cities, doubling the company’s national footprint.
When I looked into this pricing model, one thing stood out: it’s a private, out-of-pocket cost. Neko doesn’t currently work through the NHS or private health insurance in the UK, so the £299 comes straight from your own pocket, once per visit, with no subscription requirement, though many customers return annually for a repeat scan to track changes over time.
How Neko Compares to Other UK Health Checks
Neko isn’t the only player chasing this space. Private GP groups like Bupa and Nuffield Health have long offered “executive health MOTs” running into the hundreds of pounds, typically bundling blood panels with a consultation but without the imaging depth Neko offers. Genetic and biomarker startups such as Prenetics have taken a different angle, focusing on lab-based testing you can do partly at home rather than an in-clinic scan.
What sets Neko apart on paper is the imaging volume and the single-visit turnaround — most rivals still send blood work to an external lab, adding a wait of several days for results. Whether that convenience premium is worth roughly £300 a visit is a personal call, not a medical one.
What the Clinical Evidence Actually Shows
Here’s the part the glossy funding headlines skip over, and it matters if you’re weighing whether to book.
Neko’s public materials, reviewed for this piece, don’t include a completed peer-reviewed study validating the full combined screening service as a package. There is an ongoing trial registered on ClinicalTrials.gov assessing Neko’s multimodal skin-imaging technology for conditions including skin cancer and Raynaud’s phenomenon — but that trial remains a work in progress, not proof the whole scan improves outcomes.
In the US, two of Neko’s proprietary devices — branded Derma-2 and Spectrum-2 — received FDA clearance in May 2026 through the standard 510(k) pathway. Those clearances cover the specific devices and their intended uses. They don’t amount to the FDA approving “the Neko Health Scan” as one certified product, and there’s no equivalent UK regulatory sign-off publicly disclosed for the combined service either.
Neko hasn’t published figures on how often the scan throws up false positives, how many customers get sent for unnecessary follow-up procedures as a result, or how many flagged findings later turn out to be clinically meaningless. That’s not unusual for a private wellness company. It’s still a gap worth knowing about before you hand over £299 expecting medical-grade certainty.
NHS vs Neko: What’s the Difference?
The NHS offers most of the individual tests bundled into a Neko scan — blood pressure checks, cholesterol tests, diabetes screening through your GP — but rarely in one sitting, and rarely without a specific clinical reason to request them. NHS screening programmes for conditions like bowel and breast cancer follow age-based, evidence-driven protocols rather than a general “scan everything” approach.
Neko sits closer to private health insurance perks than to NHS care — comparable in spirit to the executive health checks some UK employers already offer senior staff, just marketed with sleeker branding and an AI layer on top. It’s a genuine option for people who can afford to pay for peace of mind and don’t want to wait for a GP referral. It is not a replacement for NHS diagnosis or treatment, and Neko’s own privacy notice says as much — customers are told to keep seeing their existing clinicians for anything a scan flags up.
Data Privacy Questions UK Users Should Ask
Any company gathering this much personal health data in one sitting deserves scrutiny on where that data goes. Neko’s US privacy notice describes an AI dictation system that summarises medical records, questionnaire answers, scan results, and clinical conversations, then drafts reports for clinician review.
Before booking, UK customers should ask directly: where is my scan data stored, who can access it, is it used to train Neko’s AI models, and can I request full deletion under UK GDPR? A company handling biometric and health data at this scale should have clear, published answers — not just a lengthy terms-of-service document nobody reads at check-in. If a clinic can’t give you a straight answer to a straight question about your own scan images, that’s worth treating as a red flag in itself, regardless of how good the marketing photos look.
What This Means for UK Readers
Neko Health isn’t a hypothetical American import — it’s already operating in four London locations with two more UK cities confirmed, and a fresh $700 million war chest behind it. The scan itself packages together diagnostics you could largely get through the NHS or a private GP, just faster and in one appointment, for £299 a visit.
Whether that’s worth it depends entirely on what you’re buying: convenience and reassurance, yes. A clinically validated, FDA-approved diagnostic product, not quite yet — the evidence base is still catching up to the funding round. Ask about data handling before you book, and treat any flagged result the way you’d treat any other screening: as a prompt to see your own doctor, not a diagnosis in itself.
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