The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Spotify CEO pushes full-body scans
Health care, once a side focus, now is his newest venture.
STOCKHOLM — In conversations with colleagues, fellow entrepreneurs and even musicians over the past decade, Daniel Ek would often abruptly shift the subject to something that really bugged him: health care.
“I was, like, adamant to fix it,” the Spotify CEO told DealBook. He saw the industry as a bloated and inefficient colossus in need of disrupting.
The problem: Ek had neither a plan nor the time or money to do much about it. He was busy taking on Apple, YouTube and Amazon Music in the streaming wars. In his spare time, Ek pored over medical journals. And he routinely measured his vital statistics with a Fitbit, an Apple Watch or Wii Fit tracker — the more data, the better to see how his body held up against the rigors of running a business. He thought such tracking might hold some clue to living longer and healthier.
“I was just toying around with ideas in health care,” he said.
That all changed in 2018. Spotify went public, making Ek a billionaire. It was time to turn his side focus into his next venture, he decided. He contacted Hjalmar Nilsonne, a Swedish tech entrepreneur Ek had met the previous year at Brilliant Minds, an annual gathering Ek started. Nilsonne was passionate about upending the status quo, too. At the time, he was focused on climate change and his startup, Watty, which aimed to strip waste out of the energy grid.
At first, Nilsonne rebuffed Ek’s proposition. But Ek eventually won him over. (It helped that Watty was running out of money and was eventually sold to a German company.) Ek, a former computer coder, and Nilsonne, an engineer, zeroed in on building a better diagnostic tool. Their aim: preventing disease and prolonging life. The company they founded, Neko Health, opened in Stockholm last year.
Longevity has become a kind of obsession with tech moguls. Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Ek are among those who believe that bright ideas, the right tech and bundles of capital can help humans live longer. Ek, 41, has invested millions personally and through his investment firm, Prima Materia, in such startups around Europe. Neko Health is the only one for which he’s taken the title of founder.
The company says its fullbody scans can detect the onset of a host of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, as well as skin conditions. It calls its scans, which cost about $230, “a health check for your future self.”
Whole-body scans have been around for a while. But they have taken off in recent years thanks to artificial intelligence and social media. Kim Kardashian helped put one buzzy rival, Prenuvo, on the map last summer when she referred to its MRI scanner as a “life saving machine” in an Instagram post. Another, New Yorkbased Ezra, announced in February that it had raised $21 million to help it expand to 20 North American cities by year’s end.
Despite the boom in interest, medical professionals say proactive screening technologies have yet to prove that they can achieve better outcomes for patient health or longevity. And the verdict is still out on the business model.
Like Spotify, Neko Health has big growth ambitions, but it faces a long slog in getting the green light to enter new markets. And in some ways, the Neko founders’ vision is more ambitious than their competitors’. Their goal is to make early diagnosis of diseases affordable, so that full-body scans become as routine as an annual checkup. That could help reverse a depressing pattern where gains in life expectancy have slowed in many wealthy countries over the past decade.
“Almost every trend is going in the wrong direction,” said Nilsonne, 37, Neko Health’s CEO.
There are about as many approaches to body health scans as there are companies offering them. Most involve repackaging some existing medical technology and adding proprietary software.
Prenuvo was founded by entrepreneur Andrew Lacy, and its backers include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and supermodel
Cindy Crawford. It sells hourlong MRI sessions for $2,499, then uses AI-powered software to examine the scanned images for warning signs of cancer, aneurysms and liver diseases. Ezra hopes to bring the full-body scan down to 15 minutes and charge $500.
Neko Health, with its smaller price tag, doesn’t perform MRIs or X-rays. Instead, it uses about 70 sensors and a mix of proprietary and off-the-shelf technologies to noninvasively measure heart function and circulation, and to photograph every inch of a patient’s body.
“The visual metaphor early on was around the airport scanner,” Ek said.
At a Neko Health clinic in Stockholm where I recently paid for a scan, I understood the comparison. After being handed slippers and a thin cloth robe, I entered a room with a floor-to-ceiling scan chamber that looked straight out of “Star Trek.” Soothing instrumental music added to a spalike setting.
I stepped inside the contraption and was instructed to raise my arms out to my sides. The circular door slid shut, and a voice recording — a female with a soft British accent — told me to close my eyes, take a deep breath and prepare for a blast of bright light. A series of wallmounted cameras flashed. The entire scan, which took more than 2,000 high-resolution images of my body, mapping and indexing my every blemish, lasted about 20 seconds.
Outside the chamber, the second part of the examination commenced. It involved a blood draw, as well as tests for grip strength, eye pressure and blood pressure. At one point, a device spying out of a grate in the ceiling measured my heart rate using a laser sensor. When a green light homed in on my outstretched arm, a live magnified image of my forearm showing the blood pulsing through my arteries appeared on a monitor on a nearby wall. (The illuminated patch of skin was being measured for blood flow and arterial stiffness, an indicator for cardiovascular health.)
Most Neko patients have passed the scan with a clean bill of health. But in a recent sample of 2,707 patients, life-threatening issues were found in about 1% of the cases, according to the company. (About one-quarter of those were under age 50.) And for 9% of that cohort, previously undiagnosed issues were found that were later determined to be ailments such as heart disease, skin cancer and diabetes.
Dr. Andreea Valdman, Neko Health’s lead general practitioner, walked me through my results at the end of my exam. All of the 400 suspicious-looking blotches and moles on my body that had been mapped with the help of AI were benign, Neko’s dermatologists confirmed.
Type 2 diabetes runs in my family. And my father had his first stroke at 54, so the anticipation around my blood-glucose reading — HbA1c — had me on edge. The verdict: no risk of diabetes or stroke.
It felt reassuring to know I was doing something right, and what I needed to work on.
The company said the waiting list in Sweden has swelled to 20,000.
In the United States, most major health insurers don’t typically cover such scans. And some in the medical field question their effectiveness.
“To date, there is no documented evidence that total body screening is cost-efficient or effective in prolonging life,” the American College of Radiology said last year.
One issue is false positives, Dr. Nils-Eric Sahlin, a professor of medical ethics at Lund University in Sweden, told DealBook. He said that could lead to a wave of healthy people seeking a second opinion, potentially overwhelming the most stressed parts of the health care system, and adding costs for potentially unnecessary follow-up treatment.