Stockholm startup Neko Health has made a big bet on consumers wanting to know about their health and how to prevent problems from occurring. Now, investors are making big bets on cats.
The startup has raised $260 million in new funding. This is a Series B, which values Neko at $1.8 billion post-money, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
Neco plans to use the funds to enter new markets such as the United States. We will continue to develop diagnostics, possibly through acquisitions. We plan to open more clinics depending on demand. The waiting list now exceeds 100,000 people (up from 40,000 just a few months ago), and Neko has so far scanned and evaluated 10,000 patients at clinics in Stockholm and its emerging market of London.
“It’s clear there’s an incredible demand for a different way of thinking about healthcare,” CEO and co-founder Hjalmar Nilsonne said in an interview. He spoke to TechCrunch via video link from New York, where he is working on laying the groundwork for setting up a clinic in the U.S. market.
He said the United States is a priority because it currently has the largest number of people on waiting lists outside of Europe. “Of course we want to be in the US, and we think we have a lot to contribute to the ecosystem here, made possible by this funding round,” he added.
The company’s new investor, Lightspeed Venture Partners, is leading the Series B, with participation from General Catalyst, OG Venture Partners, Rosello, Lakestar, and Atomico. The round is a $65 million Series A in 2023 by Lakestar, Atomico, General Catalyst, and Prima Materia, an investment firm co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, who happens to be Neko’s other co-founder. It continues. Prima Materia also seeded Neko with initial funding, but is not an investor in this latest round.
This funding and Neko’s growth comes at a time when demands are shifting in the medical world.
Around the world, health systems, whether state-supported or privatized, are trying to catch the signs of problems before they become problems, such as offsetting the costs of dealing with chronic and complex conditions in people who are living longer than ever before. There is increasing interest in preventive medicine. .
In addition to that, there has been a massive infusion of technology into the world of medicine and health. For example, new devices, new insights, and applications powered by artificial intelligence are changing how doctors interact with patients and what they can diagnose. , and what patients want from the healthcare environment.
Not all of these advances have evolved seamlessly – far from it – but they show little sign of disappearing, and Neko is working on all of these changes.
The Feline Health experience includes a visit to a quiet, futuristic, minimalist clinic. For £300, customers receive a one-hour test based on unique hardware and software. The test will generate “millions of health data points,” Neko said.
Moles and other marks on the skin are detected and counted as part of the skin cancer check. Parameters such as waist circumference, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, heart rate, and grip strength are measured and used to determine whether you are at risk for metabolic syndrome, stroke, heart attack, diabetes, etc. . The visit includes a consultation with your doctor and follow-up recommendations if needed.
These follow-ups may occur immediately after the first visit, including further monitoring of your blood pressure or heart activity, or they may result in another full appointment the following year. Currently, 80% of customers rebook within a year and pay for their reservations upfront, Nilsonne said.
Given that Neo is a company whose entire ethos rests on the power of data and proactive planning, its start in life was pretty random.
The company was co-founded in 2018 after Ek reached out to Nilssonne on Twitter to discuss the current state of the healthcare market in response to Nilssonne’s tweets. Neither had a background in the field – Nilsson’s previous startup was in climate technology – but through continued conversations, the initial idea for Neko began to take shape.
It took six years to assemble the team and establish Neko’s vertically integrated approach. Still, Nilssonne said, Neko entered the market hoping for the best, not knowing whether their idea would resonate. According to the company, demand currently exceeds production capacity.
Looking to the future, along with building more clinics to accommodate more users, Neko is focusing on research and development on medical hardware and software.
Until recently, medical devices were expensive to build and own, so we’re starting from a fairly low-tech baseline. “The average EKG machine used in primary care is 15 years old, which means the software is 15 years old,” Nilsonne says. “We have a completely different model of vertical integration: we manufacture these devices, we manufacture the software, we run the clinics.”
He added that Neko’s aim is to update on an annual basis, measure more parameters and offer different service tiers at different price points.
“Today’s body scan is like an iPod moment for cats,” he said. “The iPod was an iconic product that people loved and it was very exciting. But now, no one uses an iPod. This allowed Apple to create this amazing paradigm for portable computing devices. So we very much see this as the beginning of a journey in which we are going to contribute to high quality preventive diagnostics at an incredibly affordable price. , allowing us to do more with less.”
He said the latest round of funding “allows us to double down and actually increase our investment in making our products better and ultimately solving some of the core problems in healthcare.” Ta.
It also gives Neko the opportunity to put more space between itself and other companies looking at opportunities in preventive care, such as France’s Zoi and Germany’s Aware. Capital can also be distinguished from public health services such as health checks provided by the UK’s NHS, which cover many of the same areas that cats do.
A few weeks ago, one of Neko’s early backers told me that some of the most eager waiters are investors who want a first-hand check on the health of their bodies and their funds.
It appears that getting Lightspeed off the waiting list quickly paid off in a big way. As part of this funding round, Lightspeed partner Bejul Somaia will join Neco’s board of directors.