Daniel Ek’s body-scanning startup Neko Health opens first US office, in New York
- ID
- 15153
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 18 Aug 2026, 9:00 PM
- Fetched
- 18 Aug 2026, 9:41 PM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/18/daniel-eks-body-scanning-startup-neko-health-opens-first-us-office-in-new-york/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 2.5
- Created
- 18 Aug 2026, 9:43 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_founders
What happened
Neko Health, the body-scanning startup co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek and CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne, opens its first US office in SoHo, Manhattan on September 24. Over 25,000 New Yorkers have joined a waitlist; the company has scanned 100,000 people across its UK and Sweden locations and raised a $700M Series C last month. The article also notes other tech founders entering health scanning, including Midjourney planning a San Francisco spa-integrated scanner for 2027 and Function Health acquiring Ezra to add body scans.
Why it matters
Minimal practical takeaway for this audience. The only actionable signal is the broader trend of well-funded tech founders (Ek, Midjourney, General Catalyst) entering preventive health scanning as a consumer category—founders exploring health-tech or longevity-adjacent SaaS could note the funding volume ($700M Series C, $450M loan to Function Health) and waitlist demand as market validation, but there is no technical, infrastructural, or policy detail here to act on.
Discussion angle
Whether the wave of tech-founder-backed preventive health scanning (Neko, Midjourney, Fountain Life, Function Health) represents a durable category or a luxury niche—and what that implies for anyone considering health-tech as a startup space in Southeast Asia.