As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, and today there's a growing number of flashy startups that are taking that concept seriously, literally and figuratively.
Neko Health, co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsson, is on a mission to improve preventive healthcare with yearly full-body scans and AI-powered insights that can detect ailments like heart disease and skin cancer. Now the Swedish company is expanding into London, its first city outside its home market.
For a fee of £299 plus one hour, the company will carry out a series of scans and tests that will create “millions” of data points that the company says will help determine cardiovascular, metabolic and a range of other health conditions. The session will also include a face-to-face meeting with a doctor to discuss the data. Anyone interested in joining the waitlist for a visit can apply here.
The company is expanding into the UK after a strong start in Stockholm, where it opened two clinics in its first year of operation. So far it has scanned 2,707 people, of which 78.5% were found to have no health issues, but around 14.1% of visitors' results showed problems that required further treatment. Around 1% were found to have “severe” cardiovascular, metabolic or cancer symptoms. Of this group, no one was aware of their symptoms before visiting Cat, the company said.
Neko means “cat” in Japanese, and Nilsonne said it means cats have nine lives, or, more specifically, lots of good fortune. “That's how we want our system to make users feel,” he said.
Visit to a cat clinic
Despite having a big tech company like Ek on board, the company's philosophy is actually quite modest, and as a result, it can get in the way.
When I visited a London clinic for a test for this article, it took me several trips up and down London streets before I realized I'd passed a feline clinic. The only identifying marking was an “N” logo above the glass doors, stretching across the waistline. The rest of the clinic is underground, and the ground-floor lobby looks more like the unassuming entrance to a luxury apartment building than a medical center.
Entering the building and down a flight of stairs leads to an equally austere lobby, with understated furnishings, muted colours and lighting, and low, soothing electronic music playing throughout – a concept somewhere between an elegant day spa and a futuristic medical clinic.
Once there, you're introduced to their system: An assistant takes some notes about you, then escorts you into a room where you're stripped down to just your underwear, a robe, and slippers. A second assistant then measures your height and weight, and you're taken into a cylindrical room that resembles a cross between a tanning salon and an airport security scanner.
The exam room itself is fitted with 70 sensors, including dozens of stereoscopic and other cameras, which generate a composite image of the patient with 50 million data points. You'll then be moved to an exam table for two more scans, intraocular and blood pressure measurements, a grip strength test, and finally, a doctor will take your blood sample.
The blood sample is the only invasive test Neko performs, and the entire procedure takes less than an hour, after which you're quickly changed and taken to a separate examination room where a doctor reviews your data.
Neko focuses on risk and prevention, not existing conditions: Data points are grouped and presented along the various potential problems that may arise in relation to them, including skin cancer (I counted my moles, and it seems I have more than the average person), high blood pressure, and metabolic syndrome (a set of conditions that can lead to illnesses like heart disease, stroke, and diabetes).
If the data reveals a problem, you will be referred for further diagnosis and further tests will be carried out by your doctor.
An unlikely beginning
Nilsson said Ek first approached him to discuss health care via direct message on Twitter.
In 2018, Nilsson's company, a startup using AI to monitor smart home energy, was running out of cash and winding down after failing to find product-market fit with the large energy companies it hoped to attract.
Image credit: Neko Health (Opens in new window), CC BY 2.0 (Opens in new window) license.
“And then all of a sudden, I got a direct message on Twitter from Daniel.” Ek had just IPOed his audio-streaming platform Spotify, and was a newly minted billionaire looking for another wicked problem to solve that would, in Nilsson's words, “make a positive impact on the world.” He was determined to change healthcare in the same way that Spotify had changed the way we consumed recorded music.
“So he reached out to me. We didn't know each other, but he knew I worked on hardware, software and AI.”
Ek offered to fund Nilsson's startup on the spot, but Nilsson initially declined. Neither of them had a background in medicine, but Nilsson came from a family of doctors and was aware of it, and Ek was fascinated by it, so the two continued to talk and could see something starting to take shape.
Nilsson said the advent of wearables like Fitbit and the Apple Watch had given us “an incredible amount of high-quality health information.” Combine that with AI and the ability to draw “smart conclusions” from all this data, and “it was clear we could build a different kind of health care system.” Thus began a five-year journey to build a prototype of the physical clinic, its hardware components, and the software to analyze the data.
Neko itself, and its co-founders Nilsonne and Ek, come from an unlikely place: Sweden is home to one of the world's most notorious socialist healthcare systems. With free, high-quality healthcare available, one might think that a paid service like Neko would be a hard sell to consumers. But at least so far, the opposite has been true.
When the company announced a $60 million funding round last year, there were “thousands” of people on a waiting list to get scanned; now, that list has grown to 22,000.
Indeed, part of that may be because Neko is the latest project from one of Sweden's best-known living entrepreneurs (who is also a major investor in Neko through investment firm Prima Materia), but Nilsonne believes Neko fills an important gap and gives startups staying power.
Most health-care services, including in Sweden and the UK, focus on treating illnesses rather than preventative care. But an ageing population is causing a surge in the number of illnesses requiring treatment, which is putting “unsustainable” pressure on the whole system, Nilsson said, explaining that 75% of health-care costs are spent on chronic conditions.
“Our hypothesis is that prevention and early detection could solve many of these problems. Most chronic diseases are completely preventable and, with effective early intervention, could be delayed for decades. But of course, in our system, people basically visit the doctor when they're already sick, when it's too late to recover and the associated costs are very high.” (The company is not the only startup focused on preventive health tech; France's Zoi and Germany's Aware are the other two in Europe.)
In the UK, the NHS offers health checks that cover many of the same areas as Neko, but as Nilsonne points out, they are less frequent.
“NHS health checks are only available once every five years for individuals aged 44 to 74,” he points out. “The range of tests offered is very narrow and does not include a consultation to discuss the results with a doctor. Our data shows that chronic disease is increasing in individuals aged 44 and under” — which is also the average age of Neko's customers — “so it's important to adopt a proactive approach to your health to identify potential issues early, take corrective action and monitor progression over time.”