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The US healthcare system profits from sickness. Someone just raised $700M to bet against it. 🏥
Everyone assumes the incumbents will lead the prevention revolution.
They won’t. They can’t. The incentive structure won’t let them.
Neko Health just closed a $700 million Series C, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by O.G. Venture Partners, at a valuation of nearly $7 billion. That is up roughly 4x from early 2025. The company was co-founded by Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, and it builds AI-powered, non-invasive preventive health scans combining proprietary sensors, blood analysis, and clinician consultations to detect health risks early.
This is not a software play. Neko owns the full stack: hardware, software, and the clinic itself.
Here is what the round tells me:
– Over 100,000 scans completed across the UK and Sweden
– First US clinic opening in New York
– Cash-pay, direct-to-consumer model, no insurance dependency
– Participating investors include Atomico, General Catalyst, Lakestar, Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD
As CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne put it, according to The Fashion Law: “With this round, we’re taking our mission to the US for the first time, while continuing to invest in the research and technology that make prevention possible at scale.”
Here is what actually matters about this round.
The reason no US incumbent has built this is not a capability gap. It is an incentive gap. The US healthcare system is structured to get paid when you are already sick. Prevention does not generate the downstream revenue that treatment does. So the incumbents are, structurally, financially discouraged from owning this market.
Neko routes around that entirely by going cash-pay. No insurer. No hospital system. No reimbursement negotiation. The consumer pays directly, and in exchange they get a scan designed to catch problems before the expensive part begins.
💡 That is the real bet here, not the hardware. It is a bet that enough people will spend real money, out of pocket, to find bad news early.
As a founder building in healthcare, I think the cash-pay model is both the greatest strength and the biggest open question. It removes every incumbent as a competitor. But it also means Neko has to convert human psychology at scale. People are genuinely bad at paying to hear things they might not want to know.
The US expansion will be the proof point. UK and Sweden are not the same behavioral market as the US. Watch the New York clinic closely.
According to Startup Spotlight, five rounds last week totaled roughly $1.31 billion, and four of the five had AI somewhere in the pitch. But the real through-line is deployment over demos: real customers, real revenue, real clinics. Neko fits that pattern exactly.
$700 million is not a bet on a product. It is a bet on rewiring where healthcare money flows before someone gets sick. That is a harder problem than building the scanner.
👉 Follow Jonathan Govette, CEO of Oatmeal Health, for daily healthcare insights on LinkedIn. Deeper dives in The Oatmeal Bite on Substack: https://news.oatmealhealth.com
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Author:
CEO/Co-Founder @ Oatmeal Health | AI Lung Cancer Screening | Almost Became a Doctor | Engineer | Follow to Share What I’ve Learned Along the Way
I help patients get the care they need earlier, preventing late-stage cancer.
That’s been the throughline across three companies and almost 20 years in healthcare. At ReferralMD, we fixed broken referral networks so patients didn’t fall through the cracks. At Oatmeal Health, it’s lung cancer: building the diagnostic and screening infrastructure so the 85% of cases caught too late get caught early instead.
Today as CEO of Oatmeal Health, I lead a team embedding AI into radiology workflows to turn routine lung CT scans into reimbursable cancer risk assessments. We partner with FQHCs to reach underserved communities, and with health systems and payers to make early detection economically sustainable. Think HeartFlow or Cleerly, but for lungs.
Between companies, I advised at Techstars and Plug and Play, mentoring founders building in digital health. That experience shaped how I think about what separates companies that ship from companies that stall: distribution, reimbursement, and clinical trust, not just technology.
I’m a CancerX alumnus, a 3x healthcare founder, and someone who believes the biggest problems in cancer aren’t scientific. They’re operational.
We’re hiring mission-driven builders at Oatmeal Health. If you want to work on something that matters, reach out.
When I’m not working, I’m traveling, mentoring, and keeping up with one very energetic husky. 🐾
Substack – The Oatmeal Bite:
Millions of patients get less care because of who they are, where they live, or how they look. I’m fighting to change that. CEO @OatmealHealth, a startup built for the underserved. The Oatmeal Bite: intel for clinicians, investors, and advocates.
Jonathan Govette
CEO of Oatmeal Health
Substack:
https://oatmealhealthjonathangovette.substack.com/
