---
title: "Spotify’s Co-Founder Will Scan Your Whole Body for $500 (Insurance Not Included)"
description: "Daniel Ek’s Neko Health has landed in New York with a 300,000-strong waitlist and an investor who loves the product he owns a piece of"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-03T14:00:00Z
modified: 2026-10-03T21:57:14Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/spotify-s-co-founder-will-scan-your-whole-body-for-500-insur-4d8017
language: en
tags: ["health", "ai", "prevention", "startups", "ek", "tech", "business"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Spotify’s Co-Founder Will Scan Your Whole Body for $500 (Insurance Not Included)

*Daniel Ek’s Neko Health has landed in New York with a 300,000-strong waitlist and an investor who loves the product he owns a piece of*

By Nate Ledger · October 3, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/spotify-s-co-founder-will-scan-your-whole-body-for-500-insur-4d8017

## In brief

- Neko Health, co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, has opened its body-scan clinic in New York
- The company says its global waitlist tops 300,000 people and it has raised nearly $1 billion
- The one-hour scan costs $500, is not covered by insurance, and is pitched as HSA-eligible
- Investor Farooq Abbasi of Preface Ventures told TechCrunch he has been scanned twice and wants clinics everywhere
- Neko still faces U.S. scaling and regulatory approval hurdles

America’s healthcare system is so legendarily unpleasant to use that there is now a business in selling people a way to feel good about their health without going anywhere near it. The latest entrant is Neko Health, a Swedish startup that has just opened in New York and, according to a Yahoo Finance report on its arrival, already has a global waiting list topping 300,000 people. For $500 you get a one-hour scan that screens your blood, your skin and your metabolism for problems, using what the company describes as advanced imaging and computer vision.

Neko was founded in Sweden by Hjalmar Nilsonne together with Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek. (The Yahoo write-up renders his first name as “David”; it is Daniel, as the company’s previous coverage makes clear.) It has raised nearly $1 billion in total: [TechCrunch reports](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/daniel-eks-body-scanning-startup-neko-health-raises-another-700m) a $700 million round in July of this year led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners, which came on top of a $260 million Series B in January 2025. That is $960 million, which is indeed nearly $1 billion, nearly all of it raised to sell a product to people before they are sick.

## The $500 physical

Notice what the product actually is, in market-structure terms. Preventative care usage in the U.S. is low, the argument goes, because people worry about what it costs — and in the American system, cost anxiety is mostly an insurance artifact: deductibles, copays, networks, the vague sense that any encounter with a doctor will generate a bill from an entity you have never heard of. Neko’s solution is not to fix any of that. It is to route around it. The scan is not covered by insurance at all. It is a $500 cash transaction, which the company says should qualify as an acceptable expense for people with Health Savings Accounts — the tax-advantaged accounts Americans use precisely because their insurance covers so little.

There is something almost elegant about this. The pitch is “healthcare should be cheap and accessible,” and the delivery mechanism is a half-hour drive to a clinic and $500 out of pocket, subsidized by a tax break. Cheap and accessible, that is, relative to the baseline, which is the entire U.S. medical billing system. It is a strange compliment to a business model that its biggest selling point is the dysfunction of the system it is sold into.

The man making this case to TechCrunch was Farooq Abbasi of Preface Ventures, who is an investor in the company. I want to be fair here: he is a genuine enthusiast. He has been scanned twice. He says he loves it. “I think there should be Neko clinics everywhere,” he said. Of course, a man who owns part of a thing and would like the thing to be everywhere is expressing two consistent positions at once. This is a minor genre of venture capital: the testimonial with a cap table behind it.

The product itself, though, does appear to be getting denser. Abbasi compared his two scans: “In my generation one scan, it was a blood test with 15 biomarkers,” he said. “It was fifty-five this time.” The computer-vision side is, in his telling, part of a broader story of AI improving medicine, and he insists Neko is not a wellness fad but a source of what he called “actionable insights to make their lives better.”

Actionable is doing some work in that sentence, since the action, for the roughly 300,000 people on the waitlist, is to eventually pay $500. At that price, the queue alone represents something like $150 million of potential revenue, assuming everyone converts and pays what New Yorkers pay. A waitlist that long is also, not coincidentally, excellent marketing: nothing says a scan is worth having like a six-figure line of people who haven’t had it yet.

Neko still has to scale in the U.S. and work through regulatory approval, neither of which is trivial when your product is a medical-adjacent machine looking at Americans’ insides. Abbasi is undeterred: he hopes more venture money flows into the right companies, and doesn’t think anything is too broken to fix.

Fixing the system is one business. Selling people a pleasant, boutique, hour-long exemption from it, at $500 a pop, is another — and at the moment it looks like the better-funded one.