Seven years ago this week, Daniel Ek, the co-founder and chief executive of Spotify, unexpectedly slid into Hjalmar Nilsonne’s direct messages on Twitter. The pair had never met, but Ek, one of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs, was seeking a co-founder for a new project that he described as “something big”, recalled Nilsonne.
Spotify, the music streaming service launched by Ek in 2006, now has 675 million monthly listeners and revenues in excess of €15 billion. But when Ek, 42, told Nilsonne, 38, that he wanted to do something in healthcare, Nilsonne’s “heart dropped because that was the one area I was sure I would never, ever get involved in.”
The younger Swede had grown up in a family of doctors and medical scientists and had been expected to follow the same path. “Every adult would ask me, ‘What kind of doctor do you want to be?’ But having seen his parents navigate the stresses of working in medicine, Nilsonne “went as far as you could in the other direction — I loved computers and programming.”
He later did a master’s in industrial engineering and, after becoming “obsessed with the problem of climate change”, founded two companies focused on the transition to renewable energy.
So Nilsonne told Ek: “‘It’s a terrific idea; you should go out and do it, but don’t do it with me. If I’m being honest, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. This is probably the hardest industry to change.’”
But Ek wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “He’s like, ‘That’s cool, I get you don’t want to do it, but if you were going to do it, what approach would you take?’” Nilsonne thought it was an interesting enough question for him to meet Ek for a series of coffees, where they came up with the idea for Neko Health, which offers full-body scans for £299 designed to detect potential health problems before they become serious.
On Thursday, the company opened its second clinic in London, which it says has the capacity to scan 30,000 people a year. The first clinic opened in Stockholm in February 2023. An appointment is one-hour long, during which clients will be scanned by one of Neko’s custom-designed and built scanners, have blood samples taken and receive a consultation with a doctor to discuss the results.
Where health issues are flagged, patients are offered a free follow-up with a specialist in-house doctor, such as a cardiologist or dermatologist. If further investigation is required, the Neko doctor can arrange a referral to the appropriate NHS or private doctor.
Nilsonne believes it is time that preventive health became more mainstream, particularly as health services struggle to keep up with the pace of demand. “It’s crazy that it’s literally illegal not to do an MoT on your car, because we need to find out when something’s wrong before we have an accident, but for our bodies we don’t really have anything like that, so we let them crash until we really get serious about doing something.”
The new 7,466 sq ft clinic, in Spitalfields Market, in east London, opened six months after the successful Marylebone branch.
The demand has been unprecedented, with 100,000 people reportedly on the waiting list, and the company says a further two clinics will open in the UK this year. Neko has plenty of cash in the bank to fund its expansion, thanks to a $260 million investment round in January, which valued the company at $1.7 billion.
Nilsonne said it wasn’t just Ek’s track record that helped to pique the interest of investors. “It doesn’t matter whose money you have or how much money you have if you don’t have a product that people love. The reason that investors want to finance this is that… 80 per cent of our members choose to come back annually. They’re creating a new habit around prevention.”
The founders’ focus on packing as much value as they can into an hour-long appointment has helped them keep prices low for consumers, as well as building a sustainable business, Nilsonne said.
“We’ve engineered everything we can think of to get as much high-quality health information in the shortest amount of time possible. That’s making it possible for us to have a competitive price while still retaining healthy margins.
“Because if we’re losing money on every scan, we’re not going to change anything — we’ll only be around for as long as the investors will tolerate us and then we’re going to be thrown in the wastebasket of history.”
Neko’s customers are a varied bunch, Nilsonne said. “If we look at Sweden where we’ve been open longer, I would say 70 to 75 per cent of our scans are people who have never done any kind of health check-ups before. So it’s not tech bros and the early adopters — not that we don’t love those folks — but we can see the shift into the majority market.”
He said that opening in London had been a deliberate test. “We did our first one in Stockholm and it went very, very well; but we had a conundrum, which is that Daniel is kind of famous in Sweden so is this really repeatable [elsewhere]?
“We thought, ‘Where’s the most competitive healthcare market in Europe?’ It’s London. Everything is here. Mayo Clinic is here and the Cleveland Clinic. And on the other hand, you have a public health system that is free. So if our product can succeed here, it can succeed anywhere.”
Nilsonne said what excited him most about running Neko — Ek is chairman and is less involved on a day-to-day basis — is being at the cutting edge of preventive medicine. Of a total staff of about 200, half are focused on developing Neko’s proprietary technology.
“What the vast majority of our staff is working on right now is trying to build even better sensors that can understand your health better, or better software. So every year that you come back to Neko, you will see major changes in what we can measure, what we can analyse, how the doctors work. I’m jumping out of bed in the morning because that’s just unbelievably fun,” he said.
