Neko Health's $700M Manhattan Bet Meets a US Hardware Pool of 19

On July 15, 2026, Neko Health closed a $700M Series C led by Lightspeed at a roughly $7B valuation and confirmed its first US clinic opens in Manhattan later this year. The hiring plan spans AI engineering, hardware, firmware, and clinical ops. The problem: if you run the obvious LinkedIn search, "medical device hardware engineer, United States," you get a pool that fits in a conference room.

The US medtech hardware pool is 19 people, and 4 of them work at Varian

In Refolk's index of professional profiles, only 19 US engineers currently carry a "Hardware Engineer" or "Firmware Engineer" title inside a Medical Device or Hospital & Health Care employer. Four of those 19 sit at Varian Medical Systems, the Siemens Healthineers radiation-oncology arm in Palo Alto. That is 21% of the entire visible US pool concentrated at a single company.

This is the number every Neko Health recruiter, and every recruiter chasing Prenuvo, Ezra, Butterfly Network, Hyperfine, or the just-announced Midjourney scanner, needs to internalize before writing a single JD. The classic "medtech corridor" search does not return a workforce. It returns a rounding error.

19

The mechanism is straightforward. A Neko Health Scan is a 60-minute, radiation-free full-body pass that generates millions of data points from sensors and blood analysis. It is closer to a Kinect crossed with a spectrometer than an FDA-cleared MRI. The people who can build that device do not call themselves "medical device engineers." They call themselves sensor engineers, computer vision engineers, or firmware leads, and they work at Apple, Meta Reality Labs, Oura, Whoop, Skydio, and Vayyar. The LinkedIn industry filter buries every one of them.

Neko picked the wrong city, on purpose

Manhattan is the correct clinic location and the wrong talent location, which means every one of Neko's first 20 US engineers is a relocation package. Zero of the top-10 US regions for medtech hardware and firmware talent sit in the NYC metro, per Refolk's index. The clusters are San Jose, San Diego, Manhattan Beach, and Kennewick, Washington. Boston barely registers.

The founder logic still holds. Manhattan has the density of high-income patients Neko needs, the same customers who made Prenuvo a roughly $250M revenue business on $192M raised. Alex Tew, the Calm founder, publicly credited a Neko scan with catching a malignant mole. That is the exact demographic buying $500 concierge scans in Tribeca. Clinical demand is a Manhattan story. Engineering supply is not.

Which means the hardware firmware recruiter NYC problem for Neko is really a cross-country relocation problem. Expect a $250K base floor and relocation stipends that West Coast candidates will treat as a tiebreaker, not a lure. The comp market is about to get worse, not better, because two other funded players are hiring the same people at the same time.

Three funded body scanners, one 40-person engineering bench

Neko Health, Prenuvo, and Midjourney are now hiring against each other for the same core stack, and the total addressable engineering pool across the US body-scanner category sits in the low double digits.

Here is the shape of the market:

The Midjourney entry is the twist. TechCrunch reported the AI lab is building a body scanner integrated into a spa concept, hot tubs and saunas included, opening in San Francisco in 2027. That puts three funded body-scanning startups into a bidding war for roughly 40 core engineers over the next 12 months. Historical medtech comp discipline does not survive that.

Three funded body scanners, forty engineers, twelve months. Comp discipline does not survive that math. </pull> ## The right sourcing lanes are consumer hardware, not medtech The fastest way to staff Neko NYC is to stop searching medical device employers entirely and pivot to five adjacent lanes where the tacit skills already live. Ranked by fit: 1. **Consumer wearables sensor teams**: Oura, Whoop, Apple Watch health sensing, Fitbit alumni now scattered across Google. These engineers already ship optical heart-rate and skin-contact sensors at scale, which maps directly to Neko's Derma-2 and Echo-2 lines. 2. **Depth-camera and computer vision hardware**: Apple TrueDepth alumni, Meta Reality Labs sensor engineers, Skydio perception hardware. The Neko scan geometry is a depth-sensing problem before it is a clinical one. 3. **Automotive mmWave and radar**: Vayyar, Arbe Robotics, Tesla radar alumni. Neko's Spectrum-2 line is closer to automotive sensor fusion than to hospital imaging. 4. **Consumer-clinical hybrids**: Twenty/Twenty Therapeutics (the Verily/Google spinout) and BioIntelliSense. Both are rare in that their engineers already blend consumer sensor design with clinical validation, which is the exact Venn Neko needs. There are not many, but every one is a bullseye. 5. **Miniaturized clinical imaging**: Butterfly Network (handheld ultrasound) and Hyperfine (portable MRI). Both trained deep benches of engineers who can ship regulated software on custom hardware, and both have shed talent over the last 18 months. None of these lanes surface on a "medical device" industry filter. All of them surface if you describe the person you actually want in plain English, which is the exact gap [Refolk](/) closes: you write "sensor fusion engineer who has shipped consumer hardware and knows FDA 510(k) workflows," and get a ranked shortlist across GitHub, LinkedIn, and the open web.

refolk prompt: Find US engineers who have shipped consumer wearable sensors at Oura, Whoop, or Apple and have any FDA-regulated software experience. note: Returns a ranked shortlist across GitHub, LinkedIn, and the open web, deduplicated and filtered for current US residence and open-to-relocate signals. slug: hf3y05x019

## Stockholm expat sourcing is faster than Boston medtech

Neko builds hardware, software, and consumer experience in-house in Sweden. The tacit knowledge, the reason the £299 scan hits a 75% rebooking rate over 100,000 appointments, lives with roughly 150 people in Stockholm. The fastest way to compress the US ramp is to source Swedish and Nordic engineers already relocated to NYC, or willing to relocate.

Concrete lanes:

- **KTH Royal Institute of Technology alumni** in the US, especially the Electrical Engineering and Media Technology cohorts from 2015 to 2022.
- **Chalmers University of Technology** alumni working at Ericsson North America, Volvo Cars US, or Spotify NYC.
- **Lund University** graduates in signal processing and biomedical engineering, disproportionately represented at Axis Communications alumni networks.
- **Ex-Klarna, ex-Spotify, ex-Northvolt engineers** already in NYC who have the cultural muscle memory for Swedish engineering orgs.

The mechanism is institutional knowledge transfer, not raw title match. A KTH grad who has never touched a medical device will ramp on Neko's stack faster than a Varian firmware engineer who has never worked in a flat, in-house-everything Swedish org. This is the same reason Even Realities pulled its US growth team through LINDBERG alumni rather than eyewear generalists.

## Clinical AI is the actual bottleneck

The choke point is not hardware. It is sensor-fusion ML engineers who can also ship regulated software, and there are maybe 200 of those in the entire US. Neko's scan generates millions of data points across skin, heart, and circulation in 60 minutes. Turning that into a clinical output that survives FDA scrutiny is a Venn diagram problem, not a hiring pipeline problem.

The two deepest benches for this exact profile are Butterfly Network and Hyperfine, both of which have already trained engineers who fuse novel sensor data with regulated clinical workflows. Ezra, the NYC-based AI cancer-screening MRI startup, is the third. Prenuvo is the fourth, and it is the primary poach target on pure geographic overlap.

The comp implication is direct: for the 15 or 20 clinical-AI hires Neko needs in year one, expect $350K+ total comp for senior ICs and $450K+ for staff, before equity. Midjourney has not published a comp band, but its AI-lab base means it will not lose a bidding war on cash. Prenuvo's revenue-per-dollar-raised of about $1.30 is efficient enough that it can match on comp when it needs to defend a key engineer.

If you are recruiting into this narrow Venn, Refolk lets you ask directly for "engineers who have shipped an FDA 510(k) cleared product and published on sensor fusion or medical imaging ML in the last three years," and returns the intersection instead of the union.

## What Neko's investor list tells you about intro paths

The individual investor list is a sourcing map, not a cap table. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Alexis Ohanian, Ari Emanuel, Tim Ferriss, and Jimmy Iovine all wrote personal checks. Two useful implications:

- **Meta Reality Labs is an open door.** The Zuckerberg check makes warm intros into Reality Labs sensor and optics teams politically cheap. That is the single densest concentration of the depth-camera and computer-vision hardware skills Neko needs, and layoffs across the org over the last 18 months have loosened retention grip.
- **776 portfolio and Ohanian's operator network** unlocks consumer hardware operators who have already built subscription-scan or membership-health businesses. Less directly useful for firmware hires, very directly useful for clinical ops and growth leadership.

The Emanuel and Iovine names are talent-adjacent in a different way: they signal Neko will attract celebrity-tier patients in Manhattan, which changes the equity story for a senior engineer weighing a $250K NYC move.

```stat
number: 300,000
label: Global waitlist signups by January 14, 2026
note: Neko opened its US waitlist that day. Demand is not the bottleneck. Engineering supply is.
</stat>

The 90-day sourcing plan

If you are running hiring at Neko NYC, or at any US body-scanner startup chasing the same 40-person bench, the sequence is:

1. Week 1 to 2: Map the 19-person medtech hardware pool by hand. Rule out Varian retention risks. Contact the other 15 directly.
2. Week 3 to 6: Open the five consumer hardware lanes (Oura, Whoop, Apple, Meta Reality Labs, Skydio). Screen for FDA exposure as a nice-to-have, not a filter.
3. Week 4 to 8: Run the Stockholm expat search in parallel. KTH, Chalmers, Lund alumni in NYC and SF.
4. Week 6 to 10: Attack the clinical-AI Venn: Butterfly, Hyperfine, Ezra, Prenuvo. Expect counteroffers. Budget for them.
5. Week 8 to 12: Warm intros through the investor list. Meta Reality Labs first, 776 portfolio second.

The one throughline: none of this works if you are searching by title or industry. It works if you are searching by what the person has actually built. That is why the "medical device engineer" query is the wrong tool for this job, and why plain-English search across GitHub, LinkedIn, and the open web is the right one.

FAQ

How many US engineers can Neko Health actually poach for its Manhattan clinic?

The directly-titled pool is 19, per Refolk's index of US hardware and firmware engineers inside medical device employers, and four of those sit at Varian alone. The real recruitable population is much larger, maybe 400 to 600 people, but only if you source from consumer wearables, depth-camera hardware, automotive sensor teams, and Stockholm expat networks rather than from the medtech industry filter.

Who are Neko Health's direct US competitors for the same engineers?

Five funded players are hiring the same stack: Prenuvo (whole-body MRI, $192M raised, ~$250M revenue), Ezra (AI cancer-screening MRI, NYC), Butterfly Network (handheld ultrasound), Hyperfine (portable MRI), and Midjourney's newly announced San Francisco body scanner opening in 2027. Neko's $700M raise gives it roughly $140M per rival in dry powder, which is enough to win most comp fights but not enough to win them all.

Why is NYC the wrong city for hardware talent but the right city for the clinic?

Zero of the top-10 US regions for medtech hardware and firmware sit in the NYC metro. The clusters are San Jose, San Diego, and Manhattan Beach. But the patient demand, high-income concierge health buyers, is disproportionately in Manhattan, which is why Prenuvo, Ezra, and now Neko all opened there. Every early engineering hire is effectively a cross-country relocation, so plan for a $250K base floor plus relocation.

What is the fastest first move for a recruiter staffing a body-scanner startup?

Stop searching by industry. Describe the person you want in plain English: "engineer who has shipped a consumer wearable sensor, has any FDA exposure, and is open to NYC." Feed that into a tool that searches GitHub, LinkedIn, and the open web together, then layer in Stockholm alumni networks and the Meta Reality Labs sensor bench. The medtech LinkedIn filter costs you a month and returns 19 people.