Daniel Ek

From an early age, Daniel Ek was passionate about music, computers and entrepreneurship. A disrupter from the start, he built his first business at age 13. Just a few years later, he revolutionised the music industry with Spotify, and is doing it again in the wellbeing space with Neko Health. His life's mission is to support "moonshot" technologies that help humanity and the the world.

Daniel Ek was born 21st February 1983 to a nursery worker mother in Rågsved, south of Stockholm. The area was rough but his mother encouraged him to take up the pentathlon: swimming, fencing, horse riding, pistol shooting and running, which Daniel credits for helping him to focus. He comes from a musical family: his maternal grandparents were an opera singer and jazz pianist.

Daniel was given a Commodore 20 computer by his stepfather, who worked in IT, aged five, and taught himself to code within two years. In 1997, he launched his first business, making websites for local businesses. The going rate back then was around $50,000 for a build but he charged just $5,000. He recruited his teenage friends, training the mathematicians in HTML and the artists in Photoshop. At its height, this business made $50,000 in a single month. Daniel also bought some servers, diversifying into web hosting.

At 16, he applied to be an engineer at Google but was rejected because he didn’t have a degree. He enrolled in Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology to study engineering but dropped out after just eight weeks.

A gifted technologist, coder, and internet savant, Daniel went on to hold senior roles at Nordic auction company Tradera, which was acquired by eBay in 2006, and browser-based fashion game Stardoll. He carved his own path in 2005, founding ad tech start-up Advertigo. The technology he created was so useful that his main client, Tradedoubler, bought the business a year later.

Daniel was just 23 when sold his business, becoming a millionaire. He bought a red Ferrari and decided to retire - but his newfound wealth left him questioning his purpose, and he experienced a bout of depression.

Martin Lorentzon, chairman of Tradedoubler, took his company public in 2005. A year later, he too needed a new challenge. He was intrigued by Daniel’s idea to create a new way to listen to music, inspired by the success of Napster. Unlike Napster, which allowed people to share music illegally, this platform would pay artists for each play.

The pair began working on the new concept out of Daniel’s apartment. The name came about after Daniel misheard a suggestion from Martin and typed “Spotify” into Google. When there were no results, the pair decided to keep the name. It took two years to get the music labels to play ball; the pair had to demo their software with pirated software to get the execs to take them seriously. The founders invested $7m between them into the venture. In 2008, Spotify launched in Scandinavia, UK, France and Spain. It would take a further three years to go live in the US.

Today, Spotify is the world’s number one music streaming service, with 678m users, including 268m subscribers in more than 180 markets. Today, Spotify offers more than music, with social tools, millions of podcasts and audiobooks, and even an AI-powered DJ. Daniel remains CEO and chairman of the $14bn-revenue business, which has 7,300 staff. Spotify pays out around two-thirds of every dollar earned to music labels and rights holders.

In 2018, Daniel was ready for a new project. He had spotted an opportunity to leverage wearable technology and AI to make strides in preventative medicine. He approached a fellow Swede, the renewable energy entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, via X (then Twitter) asking to collaborate. At first, Hjalmar said no; hailing from a family of doctors and medical scientists, he wanted to forge his own path.

Nevertheless, the pair met for coffee and kept on meeting until they had thrashed out the idea for Neko Health, which offers full-body scans for £299 designed to detect potential health problems before they become serious. The name Neko comes from the Japanese word for “cat,” because cats have nine lives, and the company gives customers “lucky breaks” through early detection and prevention.

The first clinic opened in Stockholm in 2023 following five years refining the technology. By 2025, there were two clinics in Sweden, and two in London and the waiting list stood 100,000 names long. It was valued at more than $1bn following its Series B round of funding in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Daniel is also a philanthropist, dedicated to supporting the “moonshot” technologies of tomorrow. In 2015, Daniel Ek co-founded the Brilliant Minds Foundation, which supports ventures that make the world more sustainable, creative, or inclusive. In 2020, Ek pledged to invest €1bn of his personal wealth into European deep tech start-ups over the next decade. Through his investment company, Prima Materia, supports ambitious projects across machine learning, biotechnology, and renewable energy.

Daniel married wife Sofia in 2016 and the couple have two daughters, Elissa and Colinne. Ek’s username on X is not his actual name, but a Swedish word: eldsjal, meaning “fiery soul”.