Neko Wants to Be the ‘Affordable Luxury’ of Longevity

Reported by Vogue.

In 2018, Spotify founder Daniel Ek had a theory: if consumers could stream any song on demand from their pocket, they'd eventually expect the same frictionless access to their own health data. He recruited Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne — son of two doctors who'd sworn he'd never enter medicine — and together they set out to, in their words, rebuild healthcare from scratch. The result is Neko Health, a chain of AI-powered preventative scan clinics that launched in Stockholm in 2023 and has since become one of the more interesting bets in the booming longevity space. According to Vogue, the company raised a $250 million Series B at a $1.8 billion valuation last January.

The premise is straightforward: preventative, full-body health scanning has long existed, but only for people who can afford days at a residential clinic running thousands of dollars. Neko's pitch is the same core insight — catch disease before it becomes disease — compressed into one hour and priced at €300 (roughly $500 in its upcoming New York location). That's approximately a tenth of what US competitors like Prenuvo or Ezra charge for comparable full-body scans. The experience itself leans hard into the premium aesthetic: clinics designed by Franquibel Lima, the architect behind Apple's Fifth Avenue flagship, HAY-branded robes, a 360-degree AI skin-mapping camera capturing over 2,000 images, blood work, ECG, grip strength testing, and a 30-minute one-on-one doctor consultation with a 3D body visualization. The technology is proprietary end-to-end. It feels expensive. It isn't, relatively speaking.

Can It Scale Without Losing the Plot?

When Neko opened its first London clinic in Marylebone in September 2024, appointments sold out in under ten minutes. The waitlist has sat around 100,000 in the UK ever since, and the company has expanded to six locations across London, Birmingham, and Manchester — growing scan volume fivefold year over year, numbers Nilsonne compares to B2B software growth, not a physical clinic business. New York is next, pending regulatory approval, with plans to expand across major US cities if the market responds. The US preventative health space is more crowded and more mature than Europe, but Nilsonne isn't worried. "US wellness enthusiasts already fly to London for the Neko scan," he says. "They've done all the American stuff — all the MRIs — and they're yearning for something different."

The New York rollout will also introduce expanded metabolic diagnostics comparable to a DEXA scan, and a health app integrating wearable data from Oura and Whoop — a timely feature in a country that's simultaneously the GLP-1 capital of the world and increasingly fixated on metabolic health markers. Longer term, Neko's cost-reduction strategy runs on two tracks: advancing its AI to automate more of what currently requires human labor, and building a disease-detection dataset compelling enough to attract employer and insurer partnerships. The goal is to make the scan cheap enough that it stops being a status symbol and starts being a standard. "Right now we're in the affordable luxury category," Nilsonne says. "Over time, we want to figure out ways of making this open to more people who today are excluded because of the price."

Full-body scans have already been celebrity-coded — Kim Kardashian credits Prenuvo with detecting a brain aneurysm, Gwyneth Paltrow has made longevity diagnostics part of her brand — but Neko is clearly positioning for the moment after the trend peaks, when this stops being aspirational and becomes expected.

Read the original at Vogue.