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Neko Health

The Spotify of healthcare

Neko Health is a healthcare technology company co-founded in 2018 by Swedish engineer Hjalmar Nilsonne and Spotify founder Daniel Ek ... "Our vision is to provide healthcare that’s proactive instead of reactive – so that people can live longer, healthier lives" ... By combining proprietary technology and thoughtful design with best-in-class clinical care and research, Neko has pioneered an affordable preventive health scan unlike any other.

Healthcare has an innovation paradox.

Medicine has become extraordinarily sophisticated at treating disease, yet the basic model through which most of us experience healthcare remains remarkably reactive. We feel something is wrong, make an appointment, undergo tests, receive a diagnosis and, eventually, begin treatment. For all the advances in science and technology, we still largely wait for illness to announce itself.

Neko Health starts with the opposite premise.

What if we could detect the signals of declining health before they become symptoms? What if sophisticated health assessment were something people routinely chose while they were well, rather than something prescribed once they were sick? And what if technology could make this kind of preventive healthcare fast, accessible and even desirable?

Founded in Stockholm in 2018 by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek and engineer Hjalmar Nilsonne, Neko has developed a technology-enabled health assessment that combines advanced sensors, blood analysis, cardiovascular measurements, artificial intelligence and medical expertise. A Neko Health Scan takes around an hour, generating millions of data points that are interpreted and discussed with a doctor.

The technology is impressive. But the more interesting innovation is the market Neko is trying to create. It wants to shift healthcare upstream, from treating illness towards understanding and preserving health. In doing so, it offers a compelling example of what happens when entrepreneurs stop trying to improve an existing category and start questioning the assumptions on which the entire system is built.

Reinventing healthcare

Neko’s origins lie partly in another industry reinvention.

Daniel Ek co-founded Spotify in Stockholm in 2006 and helped transform the economics and experience of music. Spotify did not invent music or digital distribution. Its breakthrough was to rethink access. Instead of buying and owning individual recordings, listeners gained instant access to an enormous library, increasingly personalised around their tastes.

More than a decade later, Ek turned his attention to healthcare. In 2018, he approached Hjalmar Nilsonne, a Swedish engineer and entrepreneur whose experience spanned energy technology, hardware, software and artificial intelligence. Nilsonne also came from a family of doctors, giving him an appreciation of both medicine and the limitations of healthcare systems.

Their starting point was deliberately provocative: if the healthcare system did not exist and we were designing it today, with the technologies now available, would we build it the same way?

The answer was clearly no.

Ek became Neko’s co-founder, investor and strategic backer, while Nilsonne became co-founder and CEO. The company was established in Stockholm and, rather than rushing a minimally viable product to market, spent around five years developing its technology largely away from public attention. Engineers, researchers and clinicians worked together on proprietary sensors, software and a new clinical experience. The first Neko Health centre finally opened in Stockholm in February 2023.

That patient development process is significant. Healthcare is not consumer software. An imperfect music recommendation can be corrected with the next click; an unreliable medical assessment has much more serious consequences. Neko needed to combine the experimentation of a technology company with the evidence and discipline of medicine.

Reinventing the health check

Health screening itself is not new. Wealthy consumers have long been able to purchase executive health assessments, while public health systems routinely screen for particular diseases and risk factors. Neko’s innovation is to integrate a broad range of measurements into a fast, coherent and consumer-friendly experience.

Its proprietary scanning system uses more than 70 sensors and can collect around 50 million data points in minutes. It assesses hundreds of skin marks and combines this with measurements relating to cardiovascular health, circulation and body composition, as well as blood analysis. Cardiovascular measurements can include blood pressure, ECG, heart sounds, oxygen saturation, pulse and indicators associated with arterial health.

Yet the important innovation is not simply that Neko measures more things. More data does not automatically create better healthcare. The challenge is turning data into useful understanding.

At the end of the scan, a doctor reviews the results with the customer. Technology gathers information quickly and consistently; algorithms help organise and analyse it; the clinician provides interpretation, judgement and context. Neko is therefore not primarily pursuing the fashionable idea of replacing doctors with artificial intelligence. It is exploring something potentially more powerful: using machines to expand what doctors can see and humans to determine what that information means.

This combination of intelligence and humanity could become increasingly important across healthcare. AI is exceptionally good at identifying patterns across huge quantities of information. Humans remain essential when uncertainty, context, communication and judgement matter. Neko’s model brings the two together in the same experience.

From snapshots to trajectories

The deeper opportunity emerges when a customer returns.

A conventional health test provides a snapshot. Blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose or another indicator is measured at a particular moment and usually compared with population norms. That can be useful, but it tells us relatively little about the direction in which an individual is moving.

Repeated Neko scans potentially create something more valuable: a personal trajectory. Rather than simply asking whether a measurement is inside a conventional reference range, clinicians can increasingly ask how it has changed relative to that individual’s previous measurements.

This shifts the question from “Are you healthy?” to “How is your health changing?”

That distinction matters because many health problems develop gradually. A small change in isolation might mean little, while a consistent trend across several measurements could be more informative. Longitudinal data therefore creates the possibility of identifying meaningful change earlier.

It also changes the relationship between the individual and healthcare. Instead of waiting passively for symptoms, people can become active participants in understanding their own health over time. Healthcare begins to move from occasional intervention towards an ongoing relationship.

Making prevention something people want

Perhaps Neko’s most distinctive achievement is not technological but behavioural. It is attempting to make preventive healthcare desirable.

Traditional medical environments are designed primarily around clinical efficiency and necessity. Neko’s centres feel closer to sophisticated consumer technology spaces. The experience is intentionally simple and contemporary, with technology integrated into the journey rather than presented as a collection of disconnected medical procedures.

The economics reinforce this positioning. In the UK, Neko has priced its health assessment at around £299. That is clearly a premium consumer purchase, but it places the service in a very different territory from private whole-body MRI programmes and elite longevity clinics that can cost thousands.

Neko is therefore trying to create a new space between conventional primary healthcare and high-end preventive medicine: sophisticated enough to provide meaningful insight, but accessible enough to become a recurring behaviour for a much larger population.

This changes the emotional proposition. People do not necessarily visit because something hurts or because a doctor has told them to. They go because they want to know more about themselves and remain healthy.

The distinction sounds small, but strategically it is enormous. Most healthcare organisations compete for demand generated by illness. Neko is attempting to create demand around health itself.

From Stockholm start-up to global challenger

Consumer response has been striking. After launching in Stockholm in 2023, Neko expanded in Sweden and entered London in 2024. Demand significantly exceeded the number of available appointments, generating waiting lists as the company built additional capacity.

Investment followed. Neko raised €60 million in a Series A financing in 2023. In January 2025, it raised another $260 million in a Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, alongside investors including General Catalyst, Lakestar and others. The round valued the company at approximately $1.8 billion.

By 2026, hundreds of thousands of people had registered their interest in Neko scans globally, and the company announced plans to enter the United States, beginning in New York before expanding to other major cities.

The US represents an important test. Neko has demonstrated that it can create curiosity and demand. It must now prove that it can scale a clinically credible service across different healthcare systems without losing the quality of the experience.

Healthcare does not scale like Spotify. Every geography brings different regulations, clinical standards, professional requirements and consumer expectations. Physical centres require capital and trained people. Medical decisions require accountability. Neko’s next phase is therefore as much an organisational challenge as a technological one.

Building a health-intelligence flywheel

The strategic potential becomes clearer when Neko is viewed not simply as a network of scanning centres but as a learning system.

Every scan produces data. Returning customers create longitudinal data. More longitudinal data creates the potential to understand patterns of change. Better analytical models can help clinicians identify which patterns deserve attention. Better insights increase the value of the service, encouraging more people to participate and return.

The result could become a powerful health-intelligence flywheel in which sensing generates data, data creates understanding, understanding enables earlier action, and repeated participation makes the system progressively more valuable.

This may ultimately become more important than the scanner itself. Hardware can be replicated. The combination of proprietary sensing technology, longitudinal health information, clinical knowledge, AI models and trusted customer relationships is considerably harder to reproduce.

It also creates opportunities beyond the annual scan. Neko could potentially connect its deeper periodic assessments with continuous information from wearables, nutrition, sleep, exercise and other health services. Companies such as Oura are already demonstrating the value of continuously monitoring signals such as sleep, temperature, heart-rate variability and recovery. Neko provides a different layer: deeper, clinically interpreted snapshots.

The future opportunity lies in connecting these forms of intelligence. Healthcare could become increasingly continuous without becoming intrusive, giving people and clinicians a much richer picture of how health is evolving.

From health scanner to Market Maker

This is where Neko becomes strategically more interesting.

If it defines itself as a body-scanning company, it has created a distinctive product in an emerging category. If it defines itself as a preventive-health company, the addressable opportunity becomes much larger. And if it defines its purpose around helping people extend their healthy lives, the possibilities expand again.

That is the essence of what I call Market Making.

Traditional strategy starts with an established market and asks how to capture more of it. Market Makers start with an unmet human need and ask what new behaviours, experiences and ecosystems could create significantly more value.

Neko is not primarily taking market share from hospitals. It is trying to create a behaviour that previously existed only at the margins: people choosing to engage systematically with sophisticated healthcare while they still feel healthy.

The progression could therefore be much larger than it first appears: from health scan to preventive relationship; from periodic measurement to longitudinal intelligence; from early detection to personalised intervention; and ultimately from managing disease towards extending healthy life.

The more broadly Neko defines the problem, the larger the market it can potentially create.

Neko as a Future Brand

Neko is equally interesting through the lens of my Future Brand Manifesto.

Traditional healthcare brands tend to be built around expertise, reassurance and authority. These remain essential, particularly when lives are involved. But Neko adds another dimension: aspiration.

The brand is not centred on disease. It is centred on the possibility of remaining healthy.

This turns healthcare from something people often fear or tolerate into something they can actively participate in. Technology, design and medical expertise combine to create an experience that feels oriented towards the future rather than towards what has already gone wrong.

That is a defining characteristic of Future Brands. They do not simply differentiate existing products. They make a different future tangible and give customers a role in creating it.

For Neko, the proposition evolves from “we will help when you become ill” to “we will help you understand yourself so that you have a better chance of remaining well.”

That creates a fundamentally different relationship.

The limits of disruption

There is, however, an important caution.

More screening does not necessarily mean better health. Screening healthy populations can generate false positives, anxiety and unnecessary investigations. Some abnormalities may never have caused harm. Other diseases remain difficult to identify early regardless of how much data is collected.

Neko’s long-term success must therefore be measured by more than customer numbers, waiting lists or valuation. It needs to demonstrate that its approach improves decisions and ultimately contributes to better health outcomes.

This is where healthcare disruption differs from disruption in entertainment, retail or financial services. Moving fast is useful; being right matters more.

Neko’s ability to combine entrepreneurial ambition with scientific evidence will therefore be crucial. Trust could ultimately become as important an asset as technology.

Reinvention needs outsiders and insiders

The partnership between Ek and Nilsonne also offers a useful leadership lesson.

Ek brings the outsider’s instinct to question why an established system works the way it does. Having helped reinvent music, he was willing to ask whether many of healthcare’s conventions were consequences of historical constraints rather than optimal design.

Nilsonne brings the engineer’s ability to translate that provocation into a functioning system while appreciating the complexity of medicine. Around them, Neko has assembled clinicians, researchers, engineers, designers and software specialists.

That combination matters because meaningful disruption often requires both perspectives. Insiders understand why systems are difficult to change but can become prisoners of established assumptions. Outsiders see possibilities more freely but can underestimate the consequences of changing complex systems.

Market Makers need both: the imagination to challenge the system and the expertise to rebuild it credibly.

Six lessons from Neko

Neko’s journey offers six wider lessons for leaders:

Question the system before improving the product. Neko did not begin by asking how to create a better medical scanner. It asked what healthcare might look like if designed around today’s capabilities and needs.
Move value upstream. Preventing problems, or identifying them earlier, can create more human and economic value than managing their consequences.
Combine intelligence with humanity. AI and sensors can expand what organisations can see, but expertise, judgement and empathy determine what to do about it.
Reinvent experiences as well as technologies. Breakthrough innovation often comes from redesigning how people engage with a system, not simply improving its technical components.
Build relationships rather than transactions. The greater opportunity lies in understanding how health changes over time rather than providing an isolated annual test.
Define markets around outcomes. Body scanning is a category. Helping people live longer, healthier lives is a possibility space.

From treating illness to creating health

Neko began with a powerful thought experiment: if we could design healthcare again today, would we build what we have now?

That question led Ek and Nilsonne towards sensors, AI, doctors and a new kind of health centre. But those are ultimately mechanisms for achieving something much more ambitious.

The real reinvention is conceptual.

Instead of waiting for symptoms, look for signals. Instead of treating patients as passive recipients, enable people to become active participants. Instead of relying on occasional snapshots, understand trajectories. Instead of organising healthcare predominantly around illness, build more of it around preserving health.

This is what connects Neko to both Market Makers and Future Brands.

Market Makers do not simply compete harder within established categories. They redefine the problem, change customer behaviour and create new spaces for value.
Future Brands do not simply tell better stories about what companies already make. They embody a future people want to participate in creating.

Neko’s ultimate opportunity is therefore much larger than building a successful chain of scanning centres. It is to help change our expectations of healthcare itself.

For more than a century, healthcare has largely asked: What is wrong with you, and how can we fix it? The more powerful question for the future might be: What is changing inside you, and what can we do now to keep you healthy?

That shift — from treating illness to creating health — could ultimately prove far more disruptive than the scanner that started it.