The Swedish company has gone viral for its £299 full body scan that “maps millions of health data points” in less than an hour
Neko Health, is a preventive healthcare technology company co-founded by Hjalmar Nilsonne (L) and Daniel Ek (R)(Image: Neko Health)
In the city centre, within the confines of the redeveloped Lincoln Square district sits a nondescript office block.The only clue as to what lies within is the bold white lettering etched onto a frosted ruby red window.
‘Shifting Health Future’ it reads before a door swings open to reveal a padded, spaceship-style chamber and two immaculately dressed receptionists with soft smiles that make you feel both a sense of foreboding and calm. They serve as the first point of contact for the latest outpost of Neko Health, the self-described ‘preventive healthcare technology company’.
This may sound rather vague, but step inside the new home of this technology-driven Swedish start-up and you can’t help but feel you’ve been transported decades into the future.
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It is here that 20,000 body scans will be completed annually, collecting crucial information on the human body that could be a gamechanger for the future of healthcare here in the UK.
Neko Health’s new centre if positioned on Brazennose Street, just moments from Manchester Town Hall (Image: Neko Health )
This non-invasive body scan that costs £299 maps millions of health data points on the body – both inside and out – in just a few minutes.
The comprehensive health check includes assessing moles and marks across the body, symptoms of metabolic syndrome and risk factors for stroke and heart attack, along with blood sugar levels to assess pre-diabetes risk.
It also checks for skin cancer and blood abnormalities. Immediately following the scan, members receive full results as part of an in person doctor-led consultation.The whole experience is complete in just under an hour.
Its launch in Manchester – their first clinic in the North of England – and only third in the UK following two sites in London – comes as data on the best and worst-performing NHS hospital trusts in England have been named for the first time as part of Labour’s promise to transform the “broken” healthcare service.
As a private clinic though, Neko can only currently serve the people that can afford to pay for it. At £299 it might not feel all that accessible, but for co-founder Hjalmar Nilsonne it is different to the London clinics costing thousands of pounds for access, and crucially, he believes Neko is the first step in creating a “proactive healthcare system”.
Fuelled by high demand, Neko Health is marking its one-year anniversary in the UK by making its much-anticipated debut in Northern England through the opening of a Neko Health Centre in Manchester(Image: Neko Health )
“Today, the system, and perhaps for the last 200 years, has worked on the basis that when you have a disease you go to the doctor and they try to help you, but unless you have a clear reason for showing up, there isn’t really anything to talk about,” he explains whilst showing us around the new futuristic lab-style scanning rooms.
“The problem with that and the western world is that there’s a huge struggle in terms of how to deliver these services when there’s not enough doctors, funding or hospital beds.
“We need to drill into why. It turns out 80-90 percent of healthcare spending is associated with chronic disease, and this can be prevented or delayed if dealt with in its earliest stages.
“So the mission is to build technology that makes it possible to be more proactive about your health, years or decades before you have problems.”
Nilsonne co-founded the company with Daniel Ek, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Spotify in 2018.
While he comes from a family of doctors, Nilsonne, an engineer by training, had steered clear of the healthcare sector, opting instead to set up a string of successful climate-focused energy companies.
It’s located in The Lincoln on Brazennose Street and will have the capacity to serve up to 20,000 people annually(Image: Neko Health )
However, he was contacted by Ek, not long after Spotify went public, who was looking to make a meaningful impact on the world and start a company that could do for healthcare what Spotify did for music.
After several months of discussions, the mission crystallised – to help the healthcare system shift from reacting to symptoms to preventing diseases.
The founders claim that as well as increasing the chances of successful treatment thus leading to less suffering and fewer health complications, Neko can also help reduce healthcare spending, since 75 to 80 percent of costs are related to chronic diseases – many of which are preventable if caught early.
“We think that is the long-term way to get to a viable place where people live with much fewer medical issues while at the same time the medical system can manage the burdens or requirements on it more easily, ” he adds.
“In the past it’s been ultra high-end and costs thousands of pounds so what we’ve done is instead of using 100-year-old technologies is ask whether you could develop a new diagnostic style for prevention that is much more affordable, much more convenient and also comes with a nicer customer experience.”
In its second year of operation in Stockholm in 2024, the company scanned 4,362 people. Of these, 81.3 percent had no health issues, and Neko Health helped them establish a baseline and learn how to optimise and maintain good health.
Neko Health co-founder Hjalmar Nilsonne(Image: Neko Health )
However, 18.7 percent required medical treatment. Among them, 1.2 percent received potentially life-saving care for severe conditions such as cardiovascular disease, serious metabolic disorders, and skin cancer.
“The most important group is the one where we didn’t find anything wrong. Our vision is different to traditional, which is ‘if you didn’t find something, why did we do it’, but taking this group that does not yet have problems and making sure it stays that way as long as possible, that is the biggest impact.”
Walking us into the scanning suite, which feels like entering the set of a sci-fi movie, he explains how the scan works and why they’re able to have results, including blood tests, in less than an hour.
“The first part you stand in the scanner and here we have 24 different cameras, nine from the middle which take high resolution photographs of every inch of your body, thousands of them, to create an objective understanding of what your body is like today. We use 3D cameras to capture the shape of your body, and we combine that with thermal cameras which capture the temperature profile of your body.
“One of the biggest areas for us in terms of life-saving is skin cancer, so we find a lot of skin cancers where we map all the moles and doctor reviews them. We’re creating a perfect record of what it was like 1 year ago or 2 years ago, so people can start to objectively see the change.
“The second part sees us do a cardiovascular assessment, it’s the biggest killer of men and women and half of cardiovascular diseases go undiagnosed.
“You lay down on the bed and up in the ceiling there is a laser that measures the pulse moving, then a radar that goes through your clothes and senses the pulse going to the main artery, and it’s the same for feet and hands, tracking how the pulse moves through the arteries.
“Then we combine that with a system that checks your microcirculatory health, so your heart can be healthy but you could have problems with your small blood vessels.
“From here, we take a blood test and then we send it up a little tube up to the lab in another part of the building. Very few clinics would invest in having their own lab, but we think that when you meet with our doctors that you should have all the necessary information and results – within 10 minutes we can have the bloods processed.
“We also do eye pressure and grip strength tests. Grip strength is one of the best longevity markers.
“We’re trying to be as time efficient as possible and get as much valuable health information as you can, then go into the debrief room and speak with our doctors. It’s not just about getting a PDF and saying ‘all normal’, it’s about understanding what it means for you and how it might affect your life.
The Neko Health scan room (Image: Neko Health )
“We’re not in a place to judge anybody, if they want to be overweight or underweight, or drink or smoke, that’s their prerogative, but we can inform them about what it means for them.”
Some of the criticisms levelled as such preventive healthcare scans include the price and inaccessibility, as well as the potential pressure it could put on public healthcare systems.
“Most of these sorts of health checks in London cost thousands of pounds, we’ve been able to do it for £299 for two fundamental reasons.
“One is that a lot of the things you see here have been designed and engineered by us from the ground up so that’s technology that nobody else has access to so by redesigning and rethinking in smarter ways we develop things that cost a lot less.
“But secondly, Neko’s mission is for normal people to be more proactive about their health.
“Our vision is not that the world doesn’t have enough fancy clinics but that for the vast majority of people that’s not accessible to them, the way we can have a big impact on public health is create an alternative that is much more affordable but without compromising on quality.
“I am willing to stick my neck out and say we are as good as or better than the fancy places at all those things, but we do it at a much lower price.
Neko Health is a Swedish healthcare technology company co-founded in 2018 by Hjalmar Nilsonne and Daniel Ek. Neko’s vision is to create a healthcare system that can help people stay healthy through preventive measures and early detection(Image: Neko Health )
“Maybe for the first time in human history we could imagine a world where collecting health information could be affordable and easy.
“We are not part of the subsidised healthcare system which means for now we can only serve the people that can afford to pay for it. We would be thrilled to find ways to serve more people and we’re constantly working on ways that we can make the scan more affordable and comprehensive.
“Health systems would be better off long term if they found ways of giving preventive health and to those that need it most.
“Proactive healthcare needs to be much more accessible. We’ve only been here in the UK a year but if the technology is done right, maybe in 20 to 30 years time maybe the poorest people on the planet don’t have to have worse healthcare than the richest, if there’s enough investment – and we want to take part in this.
“We’ve been called the apple of healthcare many times and I think one of the reasons is that when people try to associate a comp new consumer experience the closest analogy is Apple.
“We come at this with a thinking that there’s a dire need in the world for healthcare and we want to build it – if we do it right we help millions of people. But healthcare is a big complicated system so it’s not going to happen overnight.”
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