Prevention is better than cure, as the saying goes. Today, a splashy startup that has taken that concept to heart — literally and figuratively — is expanding.
Neko Health was co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne with a mission to improve preventative healthcare with annual full body scans and AI-powered insights that can detect conditions like heart disease and skin cancer. Now, the Swedish company is launching in London, its first city outside of its home market.
For £299 and an hour of your time, the company runs a series of scans and tests that it says creates “millions” of datapoints that help determine your state of health across a range of cardiovascular, metabolic, and other conditions. An in-person meeting with a doctor to discuss the data is included in the session. Those interested in getting in line for a visit can sign up here.
The company is coming to the U.K. on the heels of a strong start in Stockholm, where it has opened two clinics in its first year of operation. To date, it has scanned 2,707 people, and while 78.5% of them were found to have no health issues, results for some 14.1% of visitors raised issues that required further medical treatment. Some 1%, it said, were identified to have “severe” cardiovascular, metabolic, or cancerous conditions. Of that group, none were aware of their conditions prior to visiting Neko, the company said.
Neko is Japanese for “cat” and Nilsonne tells me that it’s a reference to cats having nine lives, or more specifically a lot of lucky breaks. “That’s how we would hope that our system feels for our users,” he said.
A visit to the Neko clinic
Despite the participation of a major tech figure like Ek, the company’s ethos is actually very understated. As a result, it sometimes gets in its own way.
When I visited the London clinic to go through the testing process to write this article, it took me a few trips up and down a London street to realise that I had walked straight past the Neko clinic, which was marked only by its logo — an N sliced and shifted through its waistline — at the top of a glass doorway. The rest of the operation is below ground level, making the street-level lobby look more like a discreet entry to a fancy apartment block rather than a health center.
Once you enter the building and descend the stairs, you enter an equally sparse lobby with pared-down furniture, muted colours and lighting, and low-volume, soothing electronic music piped throughout. The concept is somewhere between elegant day spa and futuristic medical clinic.
Once there, you’re funnelled through their system. An assistant takes a few notes about you before leading you into a room where you strip down to your underpants, a robe, and slippers. A second assistant then measures your height and weight before moving you to a cylindrical chamber that feels like a cross between a tanning booth and a security scanner at an airport.
The chamber itself is fitted with 70 sensors, including dozens of volumetric and other cameras, to produce a composite picture of you with 50 million data points. From there, you move to an examination bed, where you have another two scans, measurements of your eye pressure and blood pressure, and a grip test. Finally, the the clinician draws a blood sample.
The blood sample is the only invasive test that Neko carries out, and altogether the experience takes under an hour. Soon after, you change and are taken to a separate consultation room where a doctor goes through your data.
Neko’s focus is on risks and proactive prevention rather than existing conditions. Data points are grouped and presented along the lines of different potential problems you might encounter related to them — among them skin cancer (my moles were counted and it seems that I have many more than the average person), high blood pressure, and metabolic syndrome (a group of conditions that can lead to illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes).
If the data reveals problems, you’re referred for more diagnostics and channeled to doctors for further examinations.
Unlikely beginnings
Nilsonne tells me that Ek first approached him to chat about healthcare over a Twitter direct message.
The year was 2018, and Nilsonne’s company at the time — an AI-powered,smart home energy monitoring startup — was running out of money and winding down after failing to find product-market fit with the big energy companies it expected to be its customers.
“Then out of nowhere, I get a direct message on Twitter from Daniel.” Ek had just taken audio streaming platform Spotify through an IPO and was a newly minted billionaire looking for another thorny problem to solve, something that would have “a positive contribution to the world,” in Nilsonne’s words. He’d gotten it into his head that he wanted to reinvent healthcare, just as he’d reinvented recorded music consumption with Spotify.
“So he reached out to me. We didn’t know each other, but he was aware of what I had been doing, working with hardware and software and AI.”
Ek offered to fund a startup with Nilsonne at the head on the spot, but Nilsonne at first rejected him. Neither of them have a medical background. But Nilsonne does come from a family of doctors so it’s in his consciousness, and Ek was obsessed, so the two kept talking, and they could see something starting to take shape.
Wearables like Fitbits and Apple Watches, Nilsonne said, have led to an “incredible explosion of abundance of high-quality health information.” Combining that with AI and the ability to draw “sensible conclusions” from all this data, “it was very clear that we could create a different healthcare system.” Thus began five years of building prototypes for the physical clinics and their component hardware, as well as the software to analyse the data.
Neko itself, plus its co-founders Nilsonne and Ek, come from an unlikely location. Sweden is home to one of the world’s most famous socialised medicine programs. You might assume that the existence of free, and good, healthcare would make a paid service like Neko a hard sell to consumers. But so far at least, the opposite has been true.
When the company last year announced a $60 million funding round, it had a waiting list of “thousands” lined up to get scans. Now that list is up to 22,000.
Yes, some of that might be down to Neko being the latest project from one of Sweden’s most famous living entrepreneurs (who is also one of Neko’s major investors by way of his investment vehicle, Prima Materia). But Nilsonne believes Neko is addressing an important gap that will give the startup staying power.
The majority of healthcare services, including those in Sweden and the U.K., are focused on treating conditions rather than preventative care. But because our populations are aging, the number of conditions that need treatment are rapidly increasing, and that’s putting the whole system under pressure “in an unsustainable way,” Nilsonne said, explaining that 75% of healthcare costs go towards chronic diseases.
“Our hypothesis is that prevention and early detection could to be the things that would solve a lot of these problems. Most chronic conditions are fully preventable, or you can delay them by decades if you have effective early interventions. But of course, in our system, you basically show up when you already have the disease, and then it’s too late to reverse them, and there are a lot of costs associated with it.”
(It is far from being the only startup focusing on preventative healthcare technology. Zoi in France and Germany’s Aware are two in Europe. In the U.K., the NHS does offer a Health Check that covers many of the same areas that Neko does, although as Nilsonne points out, it’s less frequent.)
“The NHS health check is available only once every five years to individuals aged 44 to 74,” Nilsonne points out. “It offers a much narrower range of tests and does not include a consultation with a doctor to discuss the results. We know from our data that chronic diseases are increasingly appearing in individuals under 44” — which also happens to be the average age of a Neko customer — “Therefore, it’s crucial to adopt a proactive approach to health to identify potential issues early, take corrective action, and monitor progress over time.”