A £299 full-body scan just raised $260 million. Here is what a scan can and cannot tell you.

Neko Health, the Stockholm company co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek, announced today a $260 million Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, reportedly valuing it at about $1.8 billion. The product is a one-hour, £299 scan — skin imaging, blood tests, vital signs, a clinician debrief — that the company says checks for moles, metabolic syndrome, stroke and heart-attack risk factors, pre-diabetes and blood abnormalities. It has performed 10,000 scans since February 2023 and has more than 100,000 people on a waitlist. A waitlist of 100,000 for a scan with no outcome data is the clearest measure of demand for reassurance we have seen.

What a scan can show. The individual pieces are real medicine: a blood-pressure reading, a blood-sugar test, a skin check. Bundled into an hour with good lighting, they are also real medicine. What the bundle cannot yet show is that scanning healthy people this way makes them live longer or better. That claim requires following scanned and unscanned people for years and counting outcomes, and nobody has done it. The company's descriptions are the company's; there is no independent validation in the announcement, and none is required to sell a scan.

Ben’s take

I have looked at a lot of consumer-health decks, and the shape of this one is familiar: a beautiful experience, a recurring annual visit, a waitlist as marketing. The round is a bet on how many people will book a second scan, not on whether the first one changed anything. That is a fine business. It is not evidence.

Loree’s take

Screening a population of healthy people produces findings, because bodies are full of harmless variation. The patient arrives with a report, a highlighted value and a worry, and the follow-up — the repeat test, the specialist, the biopsy — is where the real costs live. The findings that matter most in a healthy forty-five-year-old are blood pressure, blood sugar and weight, and I can get those in a visit that costs a great deal less than £299.

The question to ask before you book. For each result the scan could return, what would you do differently? If the answer to most of them is "sleep more, walk more, eat real food, see people, find something to do with my days" — and for a healthy adult it usually is — then you already have the result, and the £299 buys a prettier way to hear it.