Prevention gets tech budget it deserves as a $499, hour-long body scan backed by Zuckerberg and Sharapova lands in SoHo.
There’s a line that Neko Health likes to point to: 25,000 New Yorkers signed up before the company had even picked a paint color for its walls. It’s a waitlist number for a clinic that hadn’t opened yet, in a city that already has some of the best hospitals on the planet.
So why the line? Because Neko is selling the hour before anything goes wrong.
Strip away the marketing language and the Neko Health Scan is fairly simple to describe: one visit, about 60 minutes, no needles that draw blood in the traditional sense, no radiation. The machine and the clinician together gather a broad range of information about your heart, your skin, your blood chemistry, your metabolic markers – then you sit down with an actual person who walks you through what it means and what, if anything, you should do next [1].
That last part is the part longevity researchers have been begging for. Most of us don’t get a full-body check until something already hurts. Neko is betting that people will pay to find problems before they have symptoms, and the early numbers back that bet up: more than 350,000 people worldwide have joined the waitlist or already booked a scan, and in the UK and Sweden, over 100,000 have actually gone through with it. Three out of four of those people liked what they got enough to prepay for the next one.
Neko Health co-founder and CEO Hjalmar Nilsonne framed the US launch as a question the company had been sitting with for years.
“We’ve spent the last few years asking a simple question: What if a single visit could give you a more complete picture of your health, where it’s heading, and a clear plan from a medical professional to change what happens next?” he said. “New York felt like the right place to bring that idea to the US It’s a city where people are used to having access to the best of everything – and we think healthcare should be no different.”
The SoHo location, opening 24 September at 300 Lafayette Street, isn’t a converted storefront with a folding table and a blood pressure cuff. It’s a two-floor buildout with seven scan rooms, built to look and feel less like a doctor’s office and more like the kind of space you’d actually want to return to. That’s deliberate. Preventive care only works if people show up more than once, and Neko is designing for the second visit as much as the first.
None of this comes cheap to build. Neko’s US push follows a $700 million Series C, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by OG Venture Partners. The investor list reads like a longevity dinner party: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, tennis great Maria Sharapova, Tim Ferriss, will.i.am, restaurateur Danny Meyer.
When people with that much money and that much choice about where to put it all land on the same preventive health company, it says something about where the smart capital thinks health care is headed.
New York is just the opening chapter. Neko plans additional NYC locations, then Miami, then Washington DC and San Francisco, all within the next year.
The longevity angle nobody should skip
Here’s the part that matters most for anyone thinking about healthy aging: most of the diseases that shorten our lives don’t announce themselves early. Heart disease, metabolic decline, some cancers – they build quietly for years before symptoms show up, and by then, the cheapest and easiest window to intervene has often closed.
A yearly, deep-dive body scan doesn’t replace your doctor. But it does something longevity science has been pushing for over a decade: it moves the moment of discovery earlier, when there’s still time to actually change the trajectory. That’s the real product Neko is selling. Not a scan, but time.
Photographs courtesy of Neko Health
[1] https://www.nekohealth.com/us/en/press/neko-health-is-opening-in-new-york-city
