Stockholm startup Neko Health has made a big bet on consumers who want to know their health status and how to prevent things from going wrong. Now investors are betting big on Neko.
The startup has raised $260 million in new funding, a Series B that values Neko at $1.8 billion post-money, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
Neko will use the capital to enter new markets such as the United States; continue to develop its diagnostics, possibly with acquisitions; and open more clinics in response to demand. With a waiting list of more than 100,000 people – up from 40,000 a few months ago – Neko has scanned and assessed 10,000 patients to date at clinics in Stockholm and its new London market.
“It’s clear that there is incredible demand for a different way of thinking about healthcare,” Hjalmar Nilsonne, CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. He spoke to TechCrunch via video link from New York, where he is working to lay the groundwork for setting up clinics in the U.S. market.
The United States is a priority, he said, because it now represents the majority of people on the waiting list outside of Europe. “Of course, we want to come to the United States. We think we could contribute a lot to the ecosystem here, made possible by this round of funding,” he added.
Lightspeed Venture Partners, a new investor in the company, is leading this Series B, with participation from General Catalyst, OG Venture Partners, Rosello, Lakestar and Atomico. The round follows a $65 million Series A in 2023 from Lakestar, Atomico, General Catalyst and Prima Materia, the investment firm co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who is Neko’s other co-founder. Prima Materia also funded Neko with its seed funding, but is not an investor in this latest round.
Neko’s funding and growth comes at a time when demands in the world of healthcare are changing.
Across the world, whether health systems are state-backed or privatized, there has been a growing focus on preventative healthcare to spot signs before they turn into problems, including to offset the costs of managing chronic conditions and complex in populations that live longer than before. .
Beyond that, there has been a massive injection of technology into the world of medicine and health: new devices, new insights and applications based, for example, on artificial intelligence are changing the way doctors interact with patients, what they can diagnose and what patients look for in a medical environment.
Not all of these advances are evolving seamlessly – far from it – but they show little sign of letting up, and Neko is playing into all of these changes.
The Neko Health experience involves a visit to a clinic – quiet, futuristic, minimalist – where, for £300, a customer receives a one-hour exam based on proprietary hardware and software. This test generates “millions of health data,” Neko says.
Moles and other marks on the skin are detected and counted as part of a skin cancer check; your waist circumference, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, heart rate, grip strength and other parameters are measured and used to determine whether you are at risk for metabolic syndrome, stroke, heart attack , diabetes and more. The visit includes a consultation with a doctor and recommendations for follow-ups, if necessary.
These checks could happen immediately after the initial visit – for example, additional monitoring of blood pressure or heart activity – or it could be another full appointment the following year. Nilsonne said currently 80% of his clients have rebooked and prepaid for appointments a year from now.
Considering that Neko is a company that has staked its entire philosophy on the power of data and forward planning, it had a fairly casual start to its life.
It was co-founded in 2018 after Ek reached out to Nilsonne on Twitter to talk about the state of the healthcare market in response to a tweet from Nilsonne. Neither has industry experience (Nilsson’s previous startup was in climate technology) but through ongoing conversations, the first ideas for Neko began to take shape.
It took six years to put together a team and come up with Neko’s vertically integrated approach. Even so, Nilsonne said Neko entered the market hoping for the best but unsure whether their idea would resonate; now, demand exceeds capacity, according to the company.
Looking to the future, in addition to building more clinics to accommodate more users, Neko is focusing on the research and development of its medical hardware and software.
We start from a rather low technological base due to the costs until recently linked to the construction and ownership of medical devices. “The average ECG machine in primary care is 15 years old, which means the software is 15 years old,” Nilsonne said. “We have a completely different model where we are vertically integrated, meaning we make these devices, we make the software and we have the clinic.”
He added that Neko’s goal is to have updates on an annual cadence, introducing more metrics to measure and likely different levels of service at different price points.
“The body scan today is kind of an iPod moment for Neko,” he said. “The iPod was an iconic product that people loved, and that was exciting. But no one uses an iPod today. It allowed Apple to invest in this incredible paradigm of portable computing devices. So we see this as the beginning of a journey where we’re trying to contribute, you know, incredibly affordable, high-quality preventative diagnostics, and every year we’ll be able to do more and more with less and less.”
The funding round, he said, “will allow us to really double down and scale up our investments to improve the product, which is ultimately about solving some of the fundamental problems in healthcare.”
This will also give Neko the ability to put more space between itself and others seeking preventative healthcare opportunities, such as Zoi in France and Aware in Germany. The capital could also distinguish it from public health services, such as the Health Check provided by the NHS in the UK, which covers many of the same areas as Neko.
A few weeks ago, I heard from one of Neko’s early backers that some of the most persistent waitlists were investors who wanted to check out the company firsthand for their own body health AND of their funds.
It appears that taking Lightspeed off the waitlist quickly yielded a great result. As part of this funding round, Lightspeed partner Bejul Somaia will join Neko’s board of directors.
