Fifteen years ago, Daniel Ek broke into America’s digital-content wars with his streaming music start-up, Spotify, which has turned into a publicly traded company with a $110 billion market value. Now he and his business partner, the Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, aim to crack a higher-stakes consumer market: American health care.
The pair plan to bring Neko Health, the health tech start-up they founded in 2018, to New York this spring, DealBook is first to report.
Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne hope to capitalize on the growing number of prevention-minded Americans who are hungry to track their biometric data. Whether through wearables like Oura rings or more intensive screenings, consumers are turning to technology to improve their health and help spot the early onset of some big killers, including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
“Neko was built around a simple idea: Health care works best when it helps people stay healthy, not just treat illness,” Mr. Ek, who recently stepped down as chief executive of Spotify, told DealBook. “I’ve always believed that New York is one of the best places in the world to build. The diversity of people and ideas creates a constant drive to think differently.”
The United States will be the third market, after Sweden and Britain, for Neko Health, which offers full-body diagnostic scans and is valued at roughly $1.7 billion.
It may also be the most challenging. Several buzzy U.S. start-ups, including Prenuvo and Ezra, have added artificial intelligence to established diagnostic technologies — such as M.R.I. machines — to help customers screen for disease. (Kim Kardashian called Prenuvo’s technology a “life saving machine.”) And then there is the uniqueness of the American health care market. Customers’ tales of an affordability crisis can shock Europeans accustomed to state-run medical services.
Mr. Nilsonne and Mr. Ek said Neko Health’s big aim was to change the health care model, in which spending across much of the developed world skyrockets but longevity gains have stalled. They want to make their noninvasive scans as routine as an annual checkup.
The company, which advertises its service as “a health check for your future self,” did not say what the U.S. scans would cost. But in Stockholm, an hourlong visit at one of its clinics costs 2,750 Swedish krona (about $300). Prenuvo’s and Ezra’s most comprehensive scans can cost $3,999.
Pressed on whether Neko could create a profitable business model, Mr. Ek told DealBook in 2024, “I would be super happy if this turned out to make me no money but we actually solved real issues in the world for real people.” (That said, the company has raised the price slightly since DealBook paid for a scan in Stockholm two years ago.)
Mr. Ek’s utopian outlook hasn’t scared off investors. The company has raised about $330 million to date — including from Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Lakestar, Atomico and Mr. Ek’s venture capital firm, Prima Materia — and has gone on a hiring spree, that includes doctors and nurses, as it seeks to expand globally.
Demand is soaring. The company said that it was on a pace to provide more than 200,000 scans worldwide this year — a roughly fourfold increase from 2024 — and that its waiting list had swelled to more than 300,000, including many Americans who signed up for a slot in Europe. Seeing that data point, Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne decided to speed up their U.S. expansion plans.
The New York clinic will be “an entirely new health care experience,” Mr. Nilsonne said, adding that it will be “our biggest and most advanced location yet.”
Neko Health’s technology differs from that of many of its U.S. rivals. It does not use M.R.I. or X-rays, instead relying on scores of sensors and cameras and a mix of proprietary and off-the-shelf technologies to measure heart function and circulation, and to photograph and map every inch of a patient’s body looking for cancerous lesions.
At the moment, the company’s biggest challenge is scaling. DealBook toured Neko Health’s new laboratory on the outskirts of Stockholm with Mr. Nilsonne this week. In a former bank branch, teams of engineers and technicians are building and testing sensors, cameras and other diagnostic tools with the aim of packing more features into the scan — to detect more diseases — while shaving minutes off each visit.
Mr. Nilsonne said Neko Health scans have detected the early onset of diseases or serious medical conditions for thousands of its patients. But the medical community is divided on the need for proactive screening technologies. The fear is that mass adoption could spur a wave of false positives and send healthy people to seek follow-up medical advice, overwhelming an already swamped health care system.
Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne believe they have built a better solution. And now they’re ready to test it in the U.S. market.
Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets.
The post The Swedish Start-Up Aiming to Conquer America’s Full-Body-Scan Craze appeared first on New York Times.
