A $700 million bet on preventive health

Neko Health, the Swedish health-tech startup co-founded by Spotify founder Daniel Ek, just closed a massive $700 million Series C funding round. The money will fuel the company’s expansion into the United States, starting with a flagship clinic in New York City.

The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners. Existing backers Atomico, General Catalyst, and Lakestar also participated, alongside new investors including Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD. David Ofer of O.G. Venture Partners is set to join Neko’s board, pending regulatory approval.

With this latest injection, Neko’s total disclosed funding since 2023 now exceeds $1 billion. The company previously raised $65 million in a Series A in 2023 and another $260 million in January 2025.

A notable detail: the investor list includes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, tennis legend Maria Sharapova, musician will.i.am, and former footballer Thierry Henry. Earlier individual investors include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and actor Zoë Saldaña.

What happens inside a Neko Health scan?

Neko’s clinics offer a 60-minute, non-invasive, radiation-free health assessment. The service combines full-body imaging, blood tests, custom-built sensors, and artificial intelligence — all reviewed by a clinician during the same visit.

The scan includes an electrocardiogram, arterial measurements, body-composition analysis, and more than 2,000 high-resolution images that map a customer’s skin. Blood samples are processed on-site, so results are ready before the patient leaves. A doctor or nurse discusses findings in person.

The company screens for potential signs of skin cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and stroke risk factors. Many of these measurements — blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose — are available through standard healthcare. Neko’s pitch is convenience: one appointment, proprietary imaging, automated data collection, and immediate results.

But the company’s public materials don’t include a comparative study showing whether this bundled approach actually improves clinical outcomes or saves money versus established preventive care pathways.

US expansion: New York first, more cities to come

Neko plans to open clinics in New York and other US cities, though it hasn’t named specific additional locations or provided a detailed timeline. A waitlist for the New York clinic is already live on its website. Pricing for US scans hasn’t been announced.

Currently, the company operates eight clinics across the UK and Sweden: two in Stockholm, one each in Manchester and Birmingham, and four in London (Marylebone, Spitalfields, Covent Garden, and Victoria). In the UK, a scan costs £299 (about $400); in Sweden, it’s 2,750 Swedish kronor (roughly $285).

Since launching in 2023, Neko says it has completed 100,000 scans. More than 350,000 people have registered or joined waitlists. The company reports that 75% of customers book and prepay for a second scan at the end of their first appointment — a strong retention signal.

That repeat-booking model lets clinicians compare measurements and skin images over time. But public information doesn’t establish whether annual screening is the right interval for every age or risk group.

Regulatory clearance and the US healthcare puzzle

Two of Neko’s internally developed devices have received FDA 510(k) clearance — Derma-2 as an adjunctive telethermographic system, and Spectrum-2 as a tissue-saturation oximeter for cardiovascular measurements. These clearances apply to the specific devices and their intended uses, not to the complete Neko Health Scan as a single FDA-approved screening service.

The company positions its US clinics as preventive health and wellness providers, not full-service medical practices. Its privacy notice explicitly advises customers to continue seeing their existing doctors for diagnoses and treatment, including for conditions flagged during a Neko scan.

Specialist clinicians — dermatologists and cardiologists — review findings that need further examination. Follow-up appointments, referral letters, and introductions to outside specialists are included when recommended. But Neko’s US clinics don’t currently participate in health insurance plans, and the company says most services aren’t covered by a payer. Customers will pay out of pocket for the initial assessment.

Neko hasn’t disclosed what customers might pay for diagnostic tests or treatment delivered by external providers, nor whether employers or insurers will subsidize access.

What about the evidence?

Publicly available information doesn’t include a completed peer-reviewed study validating the full screening service. A trial registered on ClinicalTrials.gov is evaluating Neko’s multimodal skin-imaging technology for screening and diagnostic-support applications, including skin cancer and Raynaud’s phenomenon. But that trial is still ongoing.

Neko’s materials don’t disclose how often its scans produce false-positive findings, how many customers undergo additional procedures, or how many flagged abnormalities turn out to be clinically unimportant. The FDA clearances for individual devices don’t establish the performance of every algorithm used to combine or interpret the resulting data.

The company did share health-outcome data from 1,469 customers who completed a second scan about a year after their first. The group recorded improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar, while body weight stayed broadly stable. But Neko itself says this wasn’t a scientific study — there was no control group. Customers could have started treatment or changed their behavior between appointments, so the figures don’t prove the scans caused the improvements.

CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne said part of the new capital will fund further research and development. Neko recently added body-composition measurements and clinician reviews of wearable-device data. It also introduced updated versions of its Derma, Echo, and Spectrum medical devices, which capture more health data and automate more of the scanning process.

Neko didn’t disclose its valuation after this round. The Financial Times, citing unnamed sources, pegged it at around $7 billion.

For a deeper look at how AI is reshaping diagnostics, check out our coverage of NHS AI blood test reducing invasive womb cancer checks. And if you’re interested in the broader trend of preventive health screening technology, we’ve got you covered.

It’s not about the model anymore

For years, the AI industry has been obsessed with one question: who builds the smartest model? That race is far from over, but a new bet from Anthropic and Blackstone suggests the next trillion-dollar opportunity lies elsewhere. It’s not about the model. It’s about what you do with it.

Ode with Anthropic is the name of a new $1.5-billion joint venture. Backed by Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and others, the company is designed to do one thing: help the world’s largest businesses actually use AI. Not just buy a license. Not just run a pilot. Rewire core operations around it.

The move mirrors OpenAI’s own The Deployment Company, launched earlier this year. Both labs have quietly acknowledged a hard truth: selling enterprise AI requires more than a better benchmark score. It demands engineers on the ground, custom integrations, and a willingness to get your hands dirty.

How a Blackstone frustration became a company

The idea for Oe didn’t start inside Anthropic. It started inside Blackstone. The private equity giant had been trying to implement AI across its portfolio companies, bringing in both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques. The results were mixed.

One boutique stood out: Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup. Blackstone noticed. Shortly after the joint venture was announced, it acquired Fractional, turning the startup into the foundation of what is now Ode. Fractional had ended an 11-month partnership with OpenAI when the deal went through.

Chris Taylor, CEO of Ode and co-founder of Fractional, is blunt about the ambition. “It’s pretty easy to imagine this as a trillion-dollar company someday if we execute well,” he told TechCrunch. The real challenge, he says, is scaling fast without sacrificing quality.

Ode’s approach: boutique quality, private equity scale

Ode currently employs 100 engineers. It works directly with Anthropic’s applied AI team to identify where the technology can have a real impact, then builds custom systems tailored to each client’s operations. Anthropic’s internal team will continue to handle strategic, mission-aligned deployments. Ode handles the rest.

The venture will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, meaning it will use Anthropic’s technology — including features like Claude Tag in Slack — whenever possible. But it’s not locked in. If a rival model works better for a specific problem, Ode will use it.

Eddie Siegel, Ode’s chief technologist and a Fractional co-founder, puts it this way: “I think model selection matters, but it’s not where the majority of calories are spent. It’s one ingredient in a system that has to be engineered.”

The ideal customer: a CEO who’s all in

For Ode, the right customer isn’t the one with the biggest IT budget. It’s the one whose CEO is personally committed. Taylor says the work Ode does tends to be the top priority for the CEO — “the most important product feature that the company is going to build over the course of the next two years, or reworking the most important business process they have.”

That level of buy-in matters, because the work is not trivial. Taylor describes AI as “this magic, hallucinating ingredient” that needs to be carefully integrated into core business processes. Most companies simply don’t have the talent to do it themselves.

Who are Ode’s engineers? The ‘special forces’

Ode’s executives describe their team as elite generalist software engineers. Over half are former founders. Siegel calls them the kind of people who can “juggle a really challenging technical problem, but also own something end-to-end.” One Blackstone executive put it more bluntly: this is the “special forces,” not an army of forward-deployed engineers (FDEs).

Demand for such teams far outstrips supply. That’s a problem, because Ode plans to scale internationally while keeping its boutique positioning. It runs constant evaluations to measure the business impact of its implementations. But finding enough “grown-up” engineers who combine entrepreneurial experience, systems thinking, AI expertise, and enterprise product judgment is not easy.

Siegel isn’t worried. “It has never been an easier time to become an entrepreneur,” he says. “You learn so much by trying to own problems end-to-end. That’s the skill set that fits really well with Ode.”

The competition: consulting giants and rival labs

Ode is not alone in this market. OpenAI’s The Deployment Company is a direct competitor. So are consulting giants like Deloitte and Accenture, which have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams. The race to own enterprise AI implementation is already crowded.

But Ode’s backers believe the market is big enough for multiple winners. The private equity firms involved will funnel their own portfolio companies to the venture as potential customers, though Ode is not limited to selling to those companies.

The founding belief, Taylor says, is that “non-AI companies are going to be among the big winners of this whole AI moment if they adopt the technology the right way.” That’s a big if. Ode is betting it can be the one to help them get there.

The bottom line: deployment is the new frontier

Whether Ode can train enough engineers, maintain quality, and fend off competitors remains an open question. But the signal from Anthropic, Blackstone, and OpenAI is clear. The next great AI race will not be won on a leaderboard. It will be won inside the world’s largest companies, one custom integration at a time.

Models are becoming commodities. Implementation is the moat.

What happens to the oddballs when AI becomes the price of admission?

I’ve always had a weakness for the weirdos of the phone world. Brands like Meizu, Fairphone, Unihertz, and Murena — they never tried to beat Apple at its own game. They made Android feel less like a foregone conclusion. Fairphone stubbornly insisted on repairability. Unihertz shipped tiny, baffling phones. Murena tried to sell you a phone that actively resisted Google. They weren’t perfect, and most never sniffed the mainstream, but they kept the smartphone market feeling alive around the edges.

Now the AI phone push is here. And it’s starting to look less like a creative renaissance and more like a cover charge — one that many of those small, strange brands simply can’t afford.

Meizu said in early 2024 that it would abandon traditional smartphone projects and pivot entirely to AI-enabled devices. That sounds futuristic until you realize it’s really a warning label.

The rich end gets to define the future

Apple doesn’t need to own the entire phone industry to bend it toward Cupertino. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple shipped roughly one in five of the 1.3 billion smartphones sold last year — that puts it near Samsung and Xiaomi on raw volume. But the real control starts higher up the price ladder.

In phones priced at $600 or more, Apple controls more than two-thirds of the segment. At $1,000 or more, it takes more than three-quarters. That’s already lopsided. But it looks even harsher when you consider that overall smartphone shipments are forecast to fall while premium phones are still expected to grow.

The safest money in the industry is gathering around the richest buyers, the strongest ecosystems, and the companies that can raise prices without torching their customer base.

AI raises the cover charge — and it’s steep

AI makes that imbalance harder to ignore because it raises the price of being taken seriously. A smaller brand can still buy a decent OLED panel, tune a passable camera, ship a fast charger, and build something with more personality than another glass rectangle wearing a camera island like a backpack.

The next round demands more. AI phones need newer chips, more memory, cloud infrastructure, model partnerships, longer software support, and a marketing budget big enough to convince people to use the assistant they ignored last year. Counterpoint Research expects GenAI-capable phones to reach 45% of global shipments in 2026, up from 36% in 2025. That makes AI feel less like a bonus feature and more like the next entry fee.

The squeeze isn’t just in software. Reuters reported that IDC expects the smartphone market to see its biggest-ever decline in 2026, partly because AI infrastructure demand is driving up memory costs. Low-end Android makers are expected to take the hardest hit. Premium brands can absorb the shock or pass it along to customers.

Memory costs are the hidden tax

Samsung and other memory manufacturers are prioritizing high-margin AI chips over traditional DRAM and NAND. That pushes up component prices across the board. For a small brand operating on thin margins, a sudden memory price hike can wipe out an entire product line.

The weird brands are running out of room

Some smaller phone brands were niche for good reasons. Some made genuinely bad software. Some treated updates like seasonal gossip — unreliable and eventually abandoned. But the useful ones still kept Android from feeling pre-chewed. The Android world was already watching Oppo, Realme, Vivo, and OnePlus blur into each other before AI became the new seriousness test.

Meizu isn’t the whole story, but it’s a painfully tidy example. A brand that once helped make Android feel less uniform now has to explain its future through AI roadmaps and ecosystem language, because that’s where the industry has decided seriousness lives.

That’s the part I don’t want to lose in this next phone cycle. Odd little brands shouldn’t have to beat Apple to justify existing. Sometimes the useful thing is simply having a phone industry where good, strange devices can hang around long enough to make the giants look a little less inevitable.

AI is being sold as the thing that will make phones more personal. The bleak joke is that the companies most likely to survive the shift are the ones large enough to make every phone feel a little more the same.

If you care about keeping the weird alive in tech, small phone brands worth watching might give you a reason to pay attention. But don’t wait too long. The AI era doesn’t have much patience for the strange.