Spotify billionaire’s body scan startup has come to America
- ID
- 31429
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 03 Oct 2026, 10:00 PM
- Fetched
- 03 Oct 2026, 10:07 PM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/03/spotify-billionaires-body-scan-startup-has-come-to-america/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 2.5
- Created
- 03 Oct 2026, 10:08 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_startup_foundersai_ml_learners
What happened
Neko Health, the Swedish body-scan startup co-founded by Spotify's David Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, has opened in New York after raising nearly $1 billion and building a global waitlist it says tops 300,000 people. The one-hour scan screens blood, skin, and metabolism using computer vision, and is sold direct to consumers at $500 — not covered by insurance, but positioned as HSA-eligible. Investor Farooq Abbasi of Preface Ventures says his blood panel went from 15 biomarkers in an earlier generation to 55 now, and that the company is eyeing wider U.S. expansion while still facing scaling and regulatory approval work.
Why it matters
There is no direct action here for Malaysian developers or founders — this is a U.S. consumer health expansion, not tooling, infrastructure, or policy that touches your stack. The one transferable detail is the pricing model: a $500 cash-pay, insurance-bypassing screening product with a 300,000-person waitlist, which is a data point if you are building any direct-to-consumer health or diagnostics product in Malaysia's private healthcare market. Otherwise treat it as context, not a decision trigger.
Discussion angle
The $500 cash-pay, HSA-eligible, no-insurance route is the interesting part: could a direct-pay preventative screening model work in Malaysia's private health market, or does it only pencil out at U.S. income levels?