🧠 Everything You Need to Know Today

1. Daniel Ek's second act just hit a $7B valuation. Neko Health — his body-scanning clinic chain — raised $700M, roughly 4x its Series B from last year, and is now pushing into the US. Preventive health has burned a lot of hyped startups before; investors are betting Ek cracks consumer medicine the way he cracked music.

2. Celebrity-backed brands just proved they can raise like infrastructure companies. Beckham's IM8 pulled in $1B in non-dilutive financing on the back of $200M+ in run-rate revenue — no equity given up. Combined with Neko, that's $1.7B into founder-fronted consumer health in a single week.

3. AI drug discovery just got a $3.8B stamp of approval. Chai Discovery raised $400M with Eli Lilly and Pfizer as actual partners, not just logos. When pharma majors are the customers, not just the hype, that's a different kind of validation than most AI verticals get.

🔬 Top Deals You Can’t Miss

1. IM8, $1 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, non-dilutive revenue-share capital for the Beckham and Prenetics supplement brand, Hong Kong.

   

2. Neko Health, $700 million Series C at close to a $7 billion valuation, co-led by Lightspeed and O.G. Venture Partners, Stockholm.

3. Chai Discovery, $400 million Series C at a $3.8 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures, San Francisco.

   

🚂 Dopamine Dealflow

Series B+ & Growth

• Neko Health | $700 million | Series C | Stockholm, Sweden
  Builds full-body scanning clinics designed to make healthcare preventive instead of reactive, and is now opening its first United States locations. Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners co-led the round and were joined by Atomico, General Catalyst, Lakestar, and angels including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Ferriss, and Maria Sharapova.
  

• Chai Discovery | $400 million | Series C | San Francisco, United States
  Builds AI models that design new molecules from scratch for drug partners, including Eli Lilly and Pfizer. Index Ventures led the round and was joined by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Dimension, and returning backers Thrive Capital and OpenAI.

Series A

• TerraFirma | $100 million | Series A | Buda, United States
  Builds semi-autonomous heavy equipment that lets operators run construction machines remotely from screens rather than from inside the cab. Kleiner Perkins led the round and was joined by Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, PEAK6, and Magnetar Capital.
  

• Singularity | $80 million | Series A | El Segundo, United States
  Builds low-cost interceptors to knock down the cheap drones now saturating the battlefield, founded by engineers from SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril. Khosla Ventures and Felicis co-led the round, joined by New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Ventures, Harpoon Ventures, and Y Combinator.

Seed & Early Rounds

• Oak | $60 million | Seed | Tel Aviv, Israel
  Builds an AI-native identity platform that governs every human, machine, and AI-agent identity from a single control plane. Accel, Greylock Partners, and CRV co-led the round, joined by Hetz Ventures and AlphaDrive Ventures.

Strategic, M&A & Undisclosed

• IM8 | $1 billion | Growth Financing | Hong Kong
  Sells daily nutrition and longevity supplements and has scaled past $200 million in annual run-rate revenue since launching with David Beckham in 2024. General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund supplied non-dilutive capital that funds up to 70 percent of marketing spend against a capped share of revenue.
  

• State Affairs | $70 million | Undisclosed | Washington, DC
  Runs one of the country's largest networks of embedded statehouse reporters and feeds their work into an AI knowledge graph that tracks every bill and regulation across all fifty states and the federal government. Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures backed the round along with Tru Arrow Partners and Alumni Ventures.
  

• Whatnot | Undisclosed | Acquisition | United States
  Bought AI recommendation startup Shaped to sharpen real-time product discovery as live-shopping inventory and auctions shift by the second.

IPOs / Direct Listings / Issuances / Block Trades

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VC Funds Raised & Raising

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💌 Read of the Day

Daniel Ek's Neko Health Raises $700 Million and Sets Its Sights on America

The Spotify founder's preventive-health venture is now worth close to $7 billion.

Daniel Ek built Spotify into the default way the world listens to music. His second act is a chain of clinics that scan your whole body in minutes and try to catch disease before it starts. On July 15 that bet drew a $700 million Series C and a valuation near $7 billion, up roughly fourfold from its Series B early last year.

The Product Pitch
A scan takes a few minutes and captures millions of data points on skin, heart, and circulation, then walks the patient through the results with a doctor the same day. The promise is preventive care that people actually want to book, priced to reach beyond the wealthy.

The Strategy
The new funding funds the first United States clinics, starting in New York, as well as continued work on the scanning hardware. Lightspeed Venture Partners and O.G. Venture Partners co-led, and the cap table reads like a guest list, with Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Tim Ferriss, Maria Sharapova, and will.i.am all writing checks.

The Backstory
Ek co-founded the company in 2023 with Hjalmar Nilsonne and kept it quiet next to Spotify. Clinics opened in Stockholm and London first and built waitlists in the tens of thousands. Only now is it turning to the American market, where preventive scanning is both a bigger opportunity and a harder regulatory road.

Why It Matters
Preventive health has been a graveyard of hyped startups that could not get people to show up or insurers to pay. A near-$7 billion valuation and a United States push signal that investors think Ek can crack the consumer side of medicine the way he cracked music, and it puts direct pressure on incumbents like Prenuvo and hospital systems that have treated full-body scanning as a luxury add-on rather than a front door to care.

Read The Whole Story Here

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