In 2018, in a world where you could stream almost any song you want on-demand, on the move, from your iPhone, Spotify founder Daniel Ek decided consumers would soon expect the same convenience from healthcare. Health-tracking wearables like Whoop and Oura were around three years in, and had sparked something of a data-tracking obsession among the longevity-minded millennial consumer. Ek tracked down a fellow Swedish entrepreneur, Hjalmar Nilsonne, and proposed they work on a new startup — one to “rebuild healthcare from scratch”.

The son of two doctors, Nilsonne had vowed he’d never work in health, but warmed up to the idea. He became Ek’s co-founder and CEO of Neko Health once he realized the problem with the healthcare system they wanted to solve was more behavioral than it was medical. “Our current healthcare systems are fundamentally built on reactive care: when you have a problem, you go to the doctor,” says Nilsonne, who reports that 80-90% of patients in the current global healthcare system are suffering from chronic diseases, which he believes can be prevented if detected early enough.

“Why haven’t we been able to provide more preventative care? The ultra-wealthy have access to it — they go to fancy residential clinics that cost thousands of dollars for days and days spent doing scans. So we asked ourselves: how could we advance new technology to provide similar insights, but 10 or 100 times cheaper?” After five years developing the technology, the pair launched Neko’s first health scan clinic in Stockholm in 2023.

Neko hardly invented the private health scan category — US-based Prenuvo and Ezra had launched their comprehensive full-body MRI scans some five years earlier. But its hour-long AI-powered private health check-up offered a faster, more scalable alternative. At €300, it costs about a tenth of these incumbents. But the futuristic, mint green clinics — designed by the same lead architect as Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, Franquibel Lima — make the one-hour scan, with end-to-end proprietary technology, feel luxury beyond its price tag.

Upon entering the Neko clinic, you’re ushered into a modernist changing room to put on a dressing gown and slippers designed by Scandi brand Hay. Then, it’s time to strip down to your underwear for a 360-degree, AI-powered skin mapping scan, as an AI-generated female voice guides you to turn while it takes more than 2,000 photographs of every mole and freckle on your skin. A nurse then takes a full blood test, ECG, and grip strength test. Instant results are then interpreted by a doctor in a one-on-one 30-minute private consultation, against a backdrop of a moving 3D visualization of your body on a screen.

“Right now, I think we’re in the ‘affordable luxury’ category, where we provide something of very high quality, but at a price that you don’t have to be a finance mogul to afford,” Nilsonne says. “What you’ll see us do over time is try to figure out different ways of making this open to more people, who today may be excluded because of the price.” Full-body preventative health scans have become a core part of the more luxury end of the $6.8 trillion wellness market and something of a status symbol, popularized by the likes of Kim Kardashian (who credits Prenuvo for the discovery of a small brain aneurysm), Paris Hilton, and Gwyneth Paltrow. The high-tech longevity sector is fueling the upper end of the wellness market as living longer becomes the new luxury marker, and high-net-worth individuals are now choosing to spend thousands of dollars on clinical-grade diagnostics and treatments.

Neko’s plan to become the go-to affordable scan is two-pronged. First, since raising its $250 million Series B funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation last January, Nilsonne says Neko is investing heavily in improving its AI models so that it can automate more components of the scan that currently require human input, which will reduce the cost of delivering the scan over time. Second, Neko hopes that the data it accumulates over time from the early detection of disease among its patients will entice employers, insurers, and health systems to collaborate and invest in the company in future. “If we can demonstrate that Neko is able to do exceptionally high-quality preventative care at a very affordable price, that will be a very strong reason for them to work with us,” Nilsonne says.

Cracking new markets

Neko expanded into the UK in September 2024, opening its first clinic in London’s Marylebone neighborhood to test the city’s appetite for affordable, unsubsidised preventative healthcare. Despite the UK’s tax-funded public healthcare system, Nilsonne says that when clinic appointments opened in London, they sold out within 10 minutes, and Neko’s waitlist has hovered around 100,000 in the UK ever since. It’s increased the number of scans it carries out fivefold each year since launching in the capital — growth stats that are more in line with a business-to-business software company than a consumer-facing company operating out of physical spaces. It swiftly opened another five clinics across London, Birmingham, and Manchester in the last 18 months to “catch up with demand”, according to the CEO.

Now, Neko is waiting on regulatory approval to open its first US-based clinic in New York, which was originally penned for spring. Nilsonne does not disclose the price of Neko’s New York scan, but sources close to the company say it will be priced at approximately $500, to account for the New York doctor salaries and the city’s real estate. If Neko’s stateside clinic is successful, the plan is to expand with outposts across America’s biggest cities. But the US preventative healthcare market is much more mature than in Europe and the UK. In an unsubsidised healthcare system, consumers have a plurality of choice when it comes to private full-body health scans and full bio-hacking packages — from Prenuvo and Ezra’s MRI focus on cancer and organ health, to Fountain Life’s full longevity-focused membership package of regular MRI, cardiovascular testing, and metabolic screening. Nilsonne, however, believes Neko is still offering the US consumer something new.

“First, I’m incredibly fortunate to have co-founded the company with one of the few European founders to have won a category in the US, with Daniel and Spotify, so we have the right experience on board,” he says. “But we still have to earn it, and I think ultimately healthcare is a trust business.”

Nilsonne says US wellness enthusiasts already regularly fly over to London for the Neko scan. “They love it — they’ve done all the American stuff you can imagine, all the MRIs, and they’re yearning for something different,” he says. “So we’re pretty confident the product stacks up and we’re completely different from the alternatives in the market.”

More data, more customers

Neko’s New York clinic will launch with an expanded set of diagnostic scans included within the same timeframe and price, such as body composition and other metabolic diagnostics comparable to a DEXA scan, according to a person familiar with the matter. Neko will soon also launch a health app where customers can integrate data from wearable health trackers like Oura and Whoop for a year-round health database in between scans, the same person said. The US is considered the GLP-1 capital of the world, and US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he wants every citizen to use a wearable health tracker to combat high rates of obesity and diabetes, so the move further into metabolic health would arm Neko with another particularly relevant feature for the US market, which the incumbent MRI scans lack.

“When we integrate wearables data, when the doctor is debriefing you, they’ll not only look at your scan data, but all your habits as captured and tracked by your wearables, if you opt in to that,” Nilsonne explains. “Metabolic health is one of the three disease areas that drive loss of life and loss of quality of life. So medically, it makes a lot of sense, and it’s something that’s very easy to track as a consumer. It’s also something users care a lot about, particularly in the longevity and health-focused crowd.”

Nilsonne declines to comment on whether Neko will ever expand into MRI scans, but in the next 18 months, the company will continue to expand the conditions its hardware can detect, as well as this new software part of the business. Much of the luxury health scan industry is defined by some sort of niche — whether it be the cancer-detection focused MRI scans, or other scans like Viavi Cortex 360, Preventicum Optimal, and Avenues Reproductive Intelligence Review, which are focused on brain and reproductive health. Nilsonne, however, wants to continuously expand Neko’s health-detection features.

With an average age of 44 and ranging from 18 to 88, Neko’s customer base skews slightly male (55%). Much like other tech-enabled longevity offerings, Nilsonne says Neko’s early customer base was predominantly the biohacking tech bro crowd, but has since broadened — a trend that reflects the longevity industry’s merge into the mainstream. “We’ve been very lucky that the things we care about have really caught on with consumers,” Nilsonne says. “We’re seeing the world move more in this direction than we could have imagined — people went from bragging about being in the club with champagne, to bragging about ice baths and saunas. And I don’t see any science whatsoever that is slowing down. Culturally, longevity is becoming mainstream in a big way, and we want to be a company at the forefront of that.”

Neko is pitching its constantly expanding detection features for its annual health scan with an ongoing preventive health hub software component as its USP. “I think the next five years are really going to be about: OK, we have all these consumers taking control of their health, how is that going to start to interface with the healthcare system? I see our job at Neko as starting to build the connective tissue for consumers who care the most about their health to get the most out of the entire system.”