Neko Health will open its first American office on Sept. 24 in SoHo, at 300 Lafayette Street in Manhattan, bringing another layer of private health surveillance into one of New York’s most expensive neighborhoods. The health-scanning startup was founded by Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, who serves as Neko’s CEO. More than 25,000 New Yorkers have already joined the waitlist, according to the company.
Who Gets Scanned, Who Gets Sold
Neko Health currently has locations in the U.K. and Sweden. The company says it has built proprietary body-scanning technology and pairs it with bloodwork and data from fitness devices to assess a person’s health. That’s the pitch: a sleek machine, a data pipeline, and a promise that health can be sorted, measured, and packaged by a startup with venture backing. The company said that when it raised a $700 million Series C last month, 100,000 people already had scans.
The numbers tell their own story. A private company with offices across borders, a massive funding round, and a growing waitlist is not operating as a public service. It’s building a market. The people lining up for scans aren’t shaping a community health system; they’re feeding a business model that turns bodies into data and data into revenue.
The New Gatekeepers
Neko is part of a growing number of health-scanning companies created by tech founders or backed by VCs. Midjourney, the AI lab best known for its AI image and video creation model and website, is also creating a body scanner, which it plans to integrate into a spa experience. It plans to open in San Francisco in 2027. Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis also have a longevity company called Fountain Life that does scans and health assessments. Function Health, co-founded by wellness podcaster Dr. Mark Hyman, offers blood testing and added body scans after acquiring the startup Ezra.
Function recently took on a $450 million loan from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, where companies repay the money via profit-sharing arrangements. That detail matters. The money doesn’t just appear out of nowhere; it comes with strings, and those strings run through the same financial machinery that keeps private health services expanding while ordinary people are told to wait, pay, and trust the people selling access to their own bodies.
The SoHo office fits neatly into that world. It’s a polished outpost for a company founded by a tech billionaire, funded at scale, and now moving into the U.S. market with a waitlist already in place. The apparatus doesn’t need public accountability when it can rely on scarcity, branding, and the promise of personalized care.
What They Call Care
Neko says its scans combine body-scanning technology, bloodwork and data from fitness devices to assess health. That’s the language of optimization, not solidarity. It treats health as something to be extracted, sorted and sold through proprietary systems controlled by founders, investors and executives.
The company’s expansion into New York comes as more tech-backed firms push into the same space, each one offering a different version of the same deal: hand over your data, pay for the assessment, and let private power define what counts as wellness. The people at the top get capital, growth and control. The people at the bottom get scanned.
The office opens Sept. 24. The waitlist is already there. The machine is already moving.