I tried the Neko Health body scan — here are my thoughts
It’s no longer enough to focus only on treating illness more efficiently. The real value in healthcare is shifting earlier in the journey, long before someone becomes a patient, and that shift is increasingly where investment attention is going too.
I’ve heard this repeatedly from various industry sources: capital is gradually shifting away from traditional healthcare systems towards prediction, prevention, and continuous monitoring. Since COVID-19, early detection has become central to the conversation. That is also where a lot of venture and private equity money is starting to cluster: wearables, diagnostics, at-home testing and data platforms that sit upstream of traditional care.
Last week I tried the Neko Health scan that has been getting a lot of attention. Neko Health is a Swedish preventive health company building full-body scans that are less about diagnosing specific conditions and more about mapping potential future health risks.
The experience is calm and quite futuristic. You go through checks like blood pressure, heart rate, cardiovascular risk scoring, body composition, oxygen levels, circulation and AI-assisted skin imaging. You also get a same-day consultation with a doctor, and everything is compiled into a digital report you can track over time. It all takes under an hour and costs £299.
Neko does not go deep into areas like hormones, gut health, genetics or advanced imaging such as MRI or CT. The aim is to build a longitudinal view of health rather than focus on one-off issues, so it functions more as an early warning layer than full preventive medicine, useful for spotting signals rather than fully explaining them.
Services like this sit in an awkward but interesting middle ground. They are not quite diagnostics, not quite wellness and not yet part of mainstream clinical pathways. That positioning matters, especially for funding and reimbursement.
It is generally marketed as a wellness-style “health MOT” rather than medical treatment. Because of that, insurers like Bupa, Aviva, Vitality, AXA and others typically do not cover it, since reimbursement is tied to medical necessity rather than broad screening of healthy individuals. As a result, most of the current demand is self-funded, at least for now.
From an investment point of view, prevention remains underfunded. Everyone agrees it matters, but the economics are misaligned. In Sweden, roughly 3.5% of public healthcare spending goes to prevention, compared with around 1 to 1.5% in countries like France. That gap is one reason capital is starting to flow into private, consumer-facing models instead.
Companies like Neko show both the opportunity and the challenge. There is clear demand for more proactive, consumer-led healthcare, but building these models at scale is still hard. Investors are interested, but many remain cautious. Until these businesses prove they work beyond wealthy self-pay customers and fit into wider healthcare systems, prevention is unlikely to attract funding at the level its potential suggests. They need unit economics that work beyond flagship clinics, proof that the data they generate improves outcomes, and a credible path into insurance or employer-funded systems. Without that, they risk staying stuck in the premium self-pay category.
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Rakshitha Narasimhan or call 0207 183 3779.
