The $7B Startup Mapping Your Health In Just One Hour | Neko’s Hjalmar Nilsonne

Hjalmar Nilsonne (0:00)

People sometimes think that like, oh, there's some machine and you go in and you get a kind of paper receipt telling you like if you're gonna die or not. In reality, it's the exact opposite.

Alex Konrad (0:08)

Transforming how you understand your health in just one hour. Would you do it? Neko Health thinks you will, and they're trying to reinvent the doctor visit starting with a 3D scan that can map your entire body.

Hjalmar Nilsonne (0:19)

You really have this very full picture of your health in under an hour.

Alex Konrad (0:22)

Today on the podcast, we're talking to the co-founder and CEO of Neko, Hjalmar Nilsonne, about the realities of building a moonshot business. How to combine human doctor expertise with AI, and what it was like for me to get one of those scans. Plus, the time that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek slid into Hjalmar's DMs and eventually became his co-founder.

Hjalmar Nilsonne (0:44)

He said, hey, do you want to meet for coffee? I'm interested in doing something new. And I replied in a very disparate way, I was like, hey, hey Daniel, maybe.

Alex Konrad (0:52)

I'm Alex Konrad, founder and editor of Upstarts Media. And this is The Upstarts Podcast, our weekly show where we talk to startup leaders who are punching above their weight to take on the status quo. This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian, where teams and agents get the context, coordination and control to move work forward. Try it free at jira.com. That's jira.com. Hjalmar, welcome to the podcast.

Hjalmar Nilsonne (1:15)

Thank you for having me.

Alex Konrad (1:16)

Tell us what you do at Neko.

Hjalmar Nilsonne (1:18)

So Neko is trying to democratize prevention. And the way we do it is that we have completely reinvented how prevention can be done by vertically integrating. We're the world's only vertically integrated health care provider, meaning that we build our own diagnostics, we do our own clinical studies, we run software all the way down to opening and running our own clinic with our own staff.

Alex Konrad (1:39)

And so you just opened a clinic, the first one in the US and here in New York City. What is the experience of someone who walks into one of these clinics at a high level, what are they going through?

Hjalmar Nilsonne (1:48)

Yeah, so the first thing I would say, you're going through a completely different health care experience from anything you've ever seen before. And the reason that's possible is that we control all the components that go into this. So at Neko, we do the Neko Health scan, which we think is the most valuable hour you can spend on your health. So you come in and in about 25 minutes, we map all the most important things that matters to understand what's happening with your long-term health across cardiovascular and skin and bloods and many other things that we can go into.

Then you get dressed and then you sit down with one of our prevention-trained clinicians to take all of this data and turn it from data into insights, making it something that's actually going to be helpful and useful for you. And then when you walk out, you've been in and out in less than an hour, you have all of your results, you have a full like 20 to 30 minute conversation with somebody to make sure you understand what you need to know. And this, by the way, is including blood and blood results. You really have this very full picture of your health in under an hour.

Alex Konrad (2:48)

So I recently went through the experience, including putting on the funny slippers or slides and taking the photo in the scanner that it seems like a lot of members take as they go through the process. And I'd love to talk more about my experience as sort of what you see from people a little bit later. But first, let's just paint the scale of Neko for the audience. My understanding, you have a few locations in the UK, in Stockholm, you're expanding across the US right now.

What is sort of the footprint of Neko as you see it and how is it changing?

Hjalmar Nilsonne (3:17)

Yeah, so we've just completed 100,000 scans in Scandinavian Europe with about eight clinics there. And now we have a big focus, we just launched in New York and we're now opening New York, we're opening Miami, we're opening DC.

So we're on this mission to make really high quality preventive healthcare accessible to millions and ultimately hundreds of millions of people.

Alex Konrad (3:40)

And at the highest level, and we'll get into the details, but the highest level, what do you think is your best explanation for why the waitlist globally is 300,000? Here in New York, you already have 30,000 people on the waitlist here. What explains that excitement?