On a chilly morning in early January, beneath the blue sky of a new year, a small group of Londoners waited in the lobby of an office clinic to have their bodies read to them like stories.
Neko Health, a Swedish start-up that offers a battery of health tests, had just opened a new location in Covent Garden. Their chief offering, a body scan that costs £299 ($400) has such high demand that prospective patients have been subject to a wait list. Lara Heywald, a 59 year-old who lives north of London, had been looking forward to her appointment for months.
Heywald isn’t a health optimist, but a health optimisationist. The mother of two goes to the gym daily and follows up with a restorative sauna; she’s done hyperbaric chambers and red light therapy and once got regenerative injections to fix her Tennis Elbow. She will try anything.
“It was so sleek and smooth and almost surreal,” Heywald said of her Neko experience. Though her skin check came up with one concerning mole, Neko sent her results to a dermatologist for additional review. 24 hours later, she got the all-clear.
A new kind of start-up is flourishing in the longevity era, one that hopes to supply paying patients with data to future-proof their bodies.
“In 2018 when we started, people thought it was a bit loony to talk about this,” said Hjalmar Nilsonne, who co-founded Neko in Stockholm with Spotify’s former chief executive Daniel Ek. “Now it’s a bit of a gold rush.” The scans themselves differ between providers: Some, like Neko, offer a suite of complementary tests in order to come up with a full(ish) health report; others, like Prenuvo or Reborne, conduct full magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in spalike environs.
They trade not in solutions but information that can look priceless. The California-based Prenuvo, and its deluxe $2,500 MRI, has made “thousands of potentially life-saving” diagnoses since its founding in 2018, according to chief executive and founder Andrew Lacy, who spoke to The Business of Beauty in late November.
Purveyors of these scans sit in a grey area between providing wellness feedback and medical care that is blooming in countries like the US and UK, where gaps in specialist care offer fertile ground.
Lacy said the company trades in “peace of mind.” “The outcome is a concierge experience,” he said, “But the goal really is to create an environment where people don’t feel afraid about their health.”
The implication is that the best patients are anxious ones. Many of these services work best when they can assure users that everything is fine, but the question of their utility becomes more complicated when they spot problems — and even when they don’t.
Already, their utility and credibility has come under fire. A new lawsuit from a New York patient alleges that the Prenuvo scan failed to catch signs of a debilitating stroke he suffered six months later. “We take any allegation seriously and are committed to addressing it through the appropriate legal process,” a Prenuvo spokesperson said.
The New Wellness Start-up
Neko operates three locations in the UK and another in Stockholm. It will open up in New York this year. The idea was to make the luxurious concept of longevity — formerly known as preventative care — accessible to all.
Each clinic evokes a spaceship interior mixed with the set of Severance, the Apple TV show that takes place in a dystopian, labyrinthine corporate office. Guests are shown to changing corridors that connect to examination rooms bathed in pale shades of light and outfitted with next-generation medical equipment.
Neko’s body scan doesn’t cover everything, but measures key biomarkers including heart health and circulation, blood pressure and content, eye pressure and grip strength. Its most touted offering, though, is a skin check performed by a massive 360 degree camera that counts and charts every freckle on a human’s body, creating a report that allows Neko patients to observe any particular spot over time. The results, which are available immediately, are discussed post-appointment with an on-site physician, alongside a presentation that stars a 3D model of the patient.
Prenuvo’s scan is 10 times more expensive but markedly more comprehensive. Their offering is a full hourlong MRI that maps the interior of a patient’s whole body, including their brain, while they watch Netflix. The company acquires its machines from the medical provider Siemens, then customises them to their clinics.
Perhaps the pinnacle of luxury longevity lies just up the street from Prenuvo: Reborne, a stately townhouse on London’s Harley Street billed as an “integrated hospital for precision healthspan medicine.”
Reborne’s clinic is staffed with an oncologist, cardiologist, psychologist and orthopaedic surgeon. They offer Dexa scans for bone density, genetic testing panels, MRIs and even aesthetic treatments like Fraxel laser or exosome facials. Its base offering, the Foundation, runs up to $6800 and unfolds over three months, while the Bespoke programme lasts a year and could cost more than $70,000.
These tests (and treatments) aren’t anything new, Reborne’s CEO Faye Mythen said. What’s novel is combining preventative and functional medicine, and wrapping it up in one luxurious little box. One of her favourite new offerings is therapeutic plasma exchange, a treatment for neurological conditions infamously popularised by the longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnston and his son in 2023.
Testing, Testing
A chief critique of body scan providers like Neko or Prenuvo is that the tests they offer can be found almost anywhere else — typically in the doctor’s offices or hospitals that have predated body scans for centuries — but exist outside of the health system.
“Imaging is a tool to support clinical decision making,” said Dr. Ralph Rogers, a regenerative orthopedist and sports medicine doctor in the UK who casts doubt on the utility of body scans. “I’m not treating image findings — I’m treating the patient that’s in front of me.” The best preventative health tools aren’t MRIs or plasma exchanges, but better diet choices, sleep and exercise.
Neko is trying to buck this assumption by designing its own diagnostic tools, rather than buying healthcare equipment from elsewhere. “We want to be more like Apple,” Nilsson said. Investment is high, but so is demand: Nilsson said that while the clinics themselves are profitable, the company is not, owing to large R&D costs. Last year, it raised $260 million in Series B funding at a $1.4 billion valuation.
Health as Luxury Product
The other, more pointed critique of these scans are that they’re only accessible to the wealthiest individuals — or at least the ones wealthy enough to opt for concierge services over the standard of healthcare.
“None of these preventative health pathways are insurable,” Mythen said. “Until the insurance market catches up with preventative health, I’m afraid, it sits in the realm of people that can afford it.”
The luxury position is reflected in where these clinics are, and who they’re marketed to. There are 25 Prenuvo clinics around the world, clustered in urban hubs like Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. Lacy declined to share Prenuvo’s revenue figures, but said the company has conducted 150,000 scans since their 2018 launch — implying gross sales of around $500 million if all of them paid full price.
Some early and influential supporters, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian, were offered comped scans in exchange for their public support, according to Lacy. Paltrow has become a convert, posting to Instagram in February about her “old wellness standbys”: “My Clearlight sauna, the meditative state I find in a bath, my annual Prenuvo, a reset weekend in Ojai with the girls.”
Outside of the radiology labs, Prenuvo’s clinics mimic upscale medspas; receptionists are smartly dressed in black pumps, and patients wear waffle-knit robes. Cultivating a premium experience was important, Lacy said. At the same time, he chafes at the suggestion that Prenuvo offers a high-end product. “Why do we feel like it’s only a certain sort of luxury subset of people that want to understand what’s going on with their health?” he asked. “I personally feel like that’s a universal human right.”
Critics might point to Paltrow’s endorsement, which Lacy pins to the brand’s “word-of-mouth” marketing, or to the price point, which Lacy said hasn’t changed in the eight years since Prenuvo’s incorporation. (The company has since introduced less comprehensive scans that start at $1000.)
But Rogers points to a different kind of preventative care.“How about not only going to the doctor, but stopping eating processed foods or drinking every night?” And, he added, it’s free.
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