👩‍⚕️ Neko Health Comes to America

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Neko Health opens its first American clinic on September 24th at 300 Lafayette Street in SoHo. The appointment takes an hour and costs $499. You get scanned, your blood gets drawn and processed on site, and before you leave, a clinician sits down and walks you through everything the machines found. 25,000 New Yorkers are already on the waitlist, which is a lot of people lining up to pay cash for something their insurance nominally covers once a year.

This is not a scrappy arrival. Neko was founded in 2018 by Spotify's Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne. The company has been running clinics in Sweden and the UK since 2023. By the time it closed a $700 million Series C in July, it had delivered 100,000 scans, with over 350,000 people signed up worldwide. Miami, San Francisco, and Washington DC are under construction.

Nilsonne's launch pitch is that modern medicine is extraordinary at fixing you once something has gone wrong and almost entirely uninterested in looking beforehand. As a description of American healthcare he is right. The line about no third-party imaging centers, no send-out labs, and nobody in the middle taking a cut was written for people who have spent an afternoon on hold with a billing department.

What the machines measure

Over 2,000 high-resolution images build a map of your skin, with every mole logged in a personal library so changes show up on the next visit. Body composition including visceral fat, estimated without a DEXA. An ECG, heart sounds, arterial stiffness, ankle-brachial index, and blood pressure taken at four points. Circulation measured with lasers down to the smallest vessels, plus grip strength and eye pressure for good measure. Blood runs through an on-site lab fast enough that the results are on the clinician's screen before your consultation.

The blood work is the least impressive component. The published panel covers HbA1c, glucose, a standard lipid profile, high-sensitivity CRP, hemoglobin, and white cell counts. That is a perfectly competent primary care panel. The panel is also smaller than what Function Health or Superpower will run you for a fraction of the price. There is no sign of ApoB, Lp(a), or fasting insulin (markers that are expected of high-end blood panels).

What you cannot easily buy elsewhere is everything that is not blood. Nobody else in New York will hand you a longitudinal skin atlas, laser-measured microvascular function, and an ankle-brachial index in the same hour for $499. If Neko has a moat on the product side, it is there.

The part that stays in Sweden

In Stockholm, Neko owns a primary care clinic called Atrium that operates inside the national health service. When a scan finds something, Neko refers you to its own clinic, pays for the visit, and the public system handles whatever comes after that. The scan sits at the front of a system with somewhere to send you.

None of that made the trip across the Atlantic. In the US, Neko describes its clinics as preventive health and wellness providers rather than medical practices. Its own privacy notice tells customers to keep seeing their regular doctors for diagnosis and treatment, including for anything the scan turns up. The clinics take no insurance.

To be fair, Neko includes more of the aftermath than the imaging companies do. In-house dermatologists and cardiologists review flagged findings at no charge, and you get referral letters and introductions to outside specialists when a clinician recommends one. But a referral letter in American healthcare is a coupon for a three-month wait and a deductible. The $499 buys the finding. Resolving the finding happens back inside the system you were paying to route around, at that system's prices and on its schedule.

54 people

The statistic carrying this launch is that about 1.2% of scans lead to a direct life-saving intervention.

It comes from Neko's second-year report. Of 4,362 members scanned, 81.3% needed no follow-up at all. The rest were referred for further testing or specialist review, and 54 people, the 1.2%, turned out to have a previously unknown life-threatening condition needing immediate attention. 

There was no control group, which Neko acknowledges in the report itself. We cannot know how many of those 54 conditions would have surfaced anyway through ordinary care in time to treat, or how many of the other 761 referrals led to useful treatment versus biopsies, anxiety, and bills for things that were never going to hurt anyone. 

The Cochrane review of general health checks, pooling randomized trials of exactly this kind of multi-test screening in healthy adults, found no reduction in deaths from any cause. What it did find was an increase in new diagnoses. Those two results are the whole screening debate summarized. Testing healthy people reliably finds more, and finding more does not reliably help.

Neko's best defense is that it is not selling whole-body MRI. Blood pressure, HbA1c, and lipids are legitimate screening targets where treating what you find has real evidence behind it. Two of Neko's devices cleared the FDA in May. But those clearances cover the devices for their stated uses. The FDA evaluated the components, not the program. Being cleared to image skin lesions is not a finding that scanning healthy people improves their health. Nobody has published a peer-reviewed study of the full scan as a screening program, and until someone does, the 1.2% is marketing wearing a lab coat.

What Neko is actually selling

The tell is in the checkout data. Roughly 3 of 4 customers prepay for next year's scan before they leave the building. Neko calls itself a one-time purchase, but its customers behave like subscribers, and the whole operation is built to encourage it.

Owning the sensors, the lab, the clinicians, and the real estate, while taking no insurance, means no billing codes, no reimbursement fights, and no intermediary with a claim on the customer relationship or the record. What Neko accumulates instead is something no hospital system has: the same proprietary instruments pointed at the same bodies, year after year, with wearable data flowing in through the app between visits. Every returning customer makes that dataset harder to replicate.

We wrote about Midjourney's scanner spas in June, and this is the same regulatory play executed by a more serious company. Launch under a wellness framing, get the machines in front of bodies, build the longitudinal evidence, and expand into regulated claims later, once the data exists to support them. Neko is simply four years further along.

Why you should care

The cost of measuring your body is collapsing. Function Health cut its price from $499 a year to $365. Superpower went from $499 to $199. Both run more blood chemistry than Neko publishes. Against that backdrop, Neko launched at $499 for a single visit and 350,000 people signed up anyway.

That tells you what is actually scarce in American healthcare, and it is not biomarkers. It is the hour. An unhurried consultation with a clinician who has already read your results, in a room designed by someone who cared, ending with a plan you understand. Primary care cannot deliver that at any price for most Americans, which is why a Swedish company can charge $499 for it and draw a line down Lafayette Street.

Whether you should be in that line depends on what you are short of. If the answer is metabolic data, $499 buys less of it here than $199 buys elsewhere, and your own doctor can order most of it against insurance. If the answer is the skin atlas, the vascular measurements, and someone with time to explain them, Neko is close to the only product of its kind. Just be clear about where the product ends. The scan finds things. The finding then belongs to you, and to the healthcare system whose failures made the scan feel necessary in the first place.

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