How VCs see healthcare becoming a subscription service

Hello friends, and welcome to The Unsophisticated Investor! Brought to you by Mark, Head of UK Expansion & Operations at Shuttle!

If you want to invest alongside the VC funds who've backed breakout companies like Revolut, Monzo, Asana, JustEat, Bolt, Lets Get Checked, Loom, Runna, Charlotte Tilbury, Deel, Aircall, AngelList, Carta, TransferWise and many more, regardless of your knowledge, network or net worth, then sign-up today using the link below.

Now, let’s get into it 👇

In July 2023, Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek and Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne announced $65 million for their company running out of a single clinic in Stockholm. Three years later, that company is valued at $7 billion and ranks among the fastest-growing startups in Europe, and as mentioned here two weeks ago, sits atop the Sifted Nordics 100 list.

Neko Health was founded in Stockholm in 2018 by Ek and Nilsonne, who runs the business as CEO, but stayed out of view for years before its Series A in 2023. By early 2024 the waitlist had reached roughly 40,000. In January 2025, Lightspeed Venture Partners led a $260 million Series B at a $1.8 billion valuation, with General Catalyst, Lakestar and Atomico following on; the waitlist had passed 100,000 and around 10,000 scans had been completed. 

By July 2026, when Lightspeed and O.G. Venture Partners led a $700 million Series C, more than 350,000 people had registered and over 100,000 had been scanned, across Stockholm, four London sites, Manchester and Birmingham, with a first US clinic planned for New York. Several outlets put the resulting valuation at close to $7 billion.

In this edition we look at how Neko was built, what its £299 scan actually sells, and why the number got this high. We also look at the trends behind the category, and why people are willing to pay a recurring fee for their own health data.

The reactive-care problem Neko says it's solving

Nilsonne's recurring argument is that healthcare in most of Europe is structurally reactive: you show up when something is already wrong, a GP triages you into a system built around treating disease rather than catching it early, and the chain that follows includes referral, imaging, bloodwork, and specialist consultations. Each stage is slow, fragmented, and billed separately (if not free at the point of use), or routed through slow, costly insurance claims where it is. Around 70% of healthcare costs, he argues, are tied to chronic disease that's largely preventable if caught early.

Neko's answer was a product that folds the entire early-detection pathway into one appointment and one fee of £299, with consumer-grade design, sold directly to the person rather than through a GP or insurer.

The early years

Neko had been built quietly since 2018, but it was its Series Around that was the moment the company became visible. Lakestar, Atomico and General Catalyst have stayed in every round since; Prima Materia, Ek's own vehicle, invested alongside them from the start, on the same terms.

What Neko launched with was narrower than today: a single Stockholm clinic, an hour-long appointment combining body imaging, thermal photography, cardiovascular measurement, mole mapping and a blood draw, with an AI-generated report in minutes. London followed in 2024, Manchester and Birmingham after the Series B, with the US and further European sites next.

Ek frames the ambition in consumer-tech terms, not medical ones, comparing Neko to Apple's vertical integration and describing the goal as delivering an experience, not a product. Nilsonne calls it riding "a shift of the healthcare market, from reactive to proactive," which only works commercially if people want to repeat the product rather than endure it.

The mechanics follow: a waitlist run as a growth and scarcity signal, a report delivered in minutes rather than a week of letters, and a repeat-visit loop built like a subscription funnel rather than a course of treatment. It collapses what's normally three or four separate appointments, GP referral, imaging centre, lab, specialist, into one hour, one clinic, and one bill.

For full disclosure I recently signed up for a screening in London, and joined a list of 100,000-plus people. Neko runs a referral scheme that lets you skip the queue if you refer four or more people, so if anyone wants a link, you know where to find me!

The valuation mechanics behind a $7 billion price tag

Core to Neko’s product is that it is designed for annual repeat scans. Knowing the value customers place on peace of mind, they are drawn back by the price tag and continued experience of an annual check-up. This is shown in the repeat appointment rates.

Staggeringly, 75-80% of customers prepay for next year's scan at their first visit. That retention number is why growth investors underwrite Neko at software multiples rather than medtech ones, with every repeat customer generating another data point against their own baseline, valuable for risk modelling and, eventually, B2B or insurer channels.

The regulatory framing does real work too. Neko, like every company named here, markets itself as wellness and prevention rather than a diagnostic medical device, keeping it outside the trial and evidence requirements a diagnostic claim would trigger, and a large part of why capital has moved this fast: no FDA-style approval stands between a funding round and a new clinic.

Neko's own first-year figures are the only real data point public: 14% of 2,707 scanned flagged for further attention, 1% receiving what it calls potentially life-saving interventions. 

The demand this is actually riding on

Strip away the company stories and there's a real demographic trend underneath.The world had 1 billion people aged 60-plus in 2020; the WHO projects that will double to 2.1 billion by 2050, with the over-80 cohort tripling to nearly half a billion. 

The WHO puts noncommunicable disease at roughly three-quarters of all non-pandemic deaths worldwide. Most deaths in wealthy countries come from chronic, slow-developing disease exactly what early detection targets, and what the WHO says longer lifespans alone aren't fixing: "the proportion of life in good health has remained broadly constant," meaning the extra years people gain are not, on average, healthy ones. That gap between lifespan and healthspan is the longevity category's core commercial premise.

The capital trend is easier to pin down, because it's observed rather than forecast. Rock Health's H1 2026 tally put global digital health funding at $7.4 billion across 244 deals, roughly $1 billion ahead of H1 2025. Deals of $100 million-plus took 45% of all capital on just 8% of transactions. Wellness and longevity, the category next to Neko, attracted real early-stage capital too, including a $30 million round for Superpower, a US longevity-diagnostics startup working in similar territory.

Why the subscription model is winning

None of this works unless a large number of people who feel completely healthy are willing to pay a recurring fee to be told so.

Access is the first cause. Just 43.9% of GP appointments in England were booked and delivered the same day per the Nuffield Trust's last detailed breakdown, and 12% of patients contacting a practice weren't offered one at all. Set against NHS England's 7.29 million-strong waiting list, much of the population has stopped expecting a GP to be the fast route to reassurance.

Generational appetite is the second. McKinsey found close to 30% of Gen Z and millennials in the US say they're prioritising wellness significantly more than a year ago, against 23% of older generations, a shift toward wearables and biomarker testing over vitamins, and part of why the UK's private healthcare market is projected to grow from $14.2 billion in 2025 to $18.6 billion by 2033.

The third cause is closer to home: the same investors funding this category made their money on Spotify, Uber and Revolut, pricing consumers who happily pay recurring fees for things they used to get free, occasionally, or badly. A generation already paying monthly for music and meditation apps doesn't need convincing that a monthly fee for their own bloodwork is an unreasonable cost to incur. 

Where European preventive-health money went in 2026

Lucis, founded in Paris and backed by Y Combinator, raised a €17.3 million Series A in May 2026, General Catalyst backs both Neko and Lucis. Lucis sells twice-yearly blood, urine and saliva testing through 450-plus partner labs for €490 a year. Where Neko centralises everything, Lucis owns none of the infrastructure: the opposite bet on scaling the same category.

Ahead Health, in Zurich, is closer to Neko's model but as a licensed medical practice: full-body MRI, CT and blood testing in 30 minutes. It raised €5.1 million in January 2026. Outside Europe: Prenuvo has raised at least $120 million for its $2,499 whole-body MRI, and Function Health closed a $298 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation before acquiring scanning startup Ezra to add a $499 scan to its membership.

For whatever part the Theranos scandal of Elizabeth Holmes had on the sector’s fundraising and technological developments, it looks like a growing number of VCs are willing to back this sector again. 

How the incumbents are responding 

Randox, a Northern Irish diagnostics group founded in 1982, still privately held, best known for £777 million in NHS Test and Trace contracts that took group revenue from £118 million to £619 million in a year and funded its consumer arm's expansion. Randox Health now runs around 30 clinics across the UK and Ireland, several inside John Lewis.

Its flagship product, RanChip Insight 360, launched in June 2026: 250-plus data points across roughly 150-200 conditions, priced at €574, results in ten working days rather than Neko's few minutes. Randox is still selling a lab result while Neko sells an experience. But the customer Randox is chasing looks more like Neko's than its own traditional one, with marketing pitched at people "approaching milestone birthdays" or "already focused on fitness," and a John Lewis "Every Athlete" partnership built around training rather than disease screening.

What Randox still doesn't do is sell a subscription. Every product remains a one-off annual panel, not a recurring plan. But it is evidence of what's happening industry-wide: where older diagnostics firms are retrofitting their product for a younger, more frequent customer relationship onto infrastructure built for occasional testing, rather than building the repeat-visit product Neko designed from day one.

What we should actually take from this

What's worth taking seriously about Neko's rise is the method, not just the number. Ek and Nilsonne didn't wait for the clinical evidence to catch up, they built the experience first, priced it like a subscription, and are now generating the dataset that could eventually make the evidence case for them. That's a different sequencing to how medtech has traditionally been built, and the same instinct that Ek used at Spotify to move past record labels that assumed they controlled distribution channels.

Despite the endless challenges that face access to healthcare across the world, companies like Neko and Lucis are paving the way for costs of service to be reduced, and VCs are helping to fund that cycle. Albeit some will be for those that can attain it, but if public healthcare can also benefit from reduced economics of delivery, that can only be a good thing for the generations ahead. 

What we’ve been working on at Shuttle

• Gearing up for our UK launch which is now just weeks away 🚀

• Locking in our events, content and partnerships schedule for the rest of the year 🧑‍🚀

• Announcement pending on a new member to our Board 🤝

The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Mark, Head of UK Expansion & Operations at Shuttle. Shuttle's mission is to break down the barriers to private markets and make wealth-building opportunities accessible beyond the ultra-wealthy elite. To do it, we're building Europe's private market infrastructure platform for running investment operations. By stripping away the legal friction and admin for deal managers, we make it easier than ever for high-performing opportunities to open up to a wider, modern network of investors.

Mark
Shuttle’s Head of UK Expansion & Operations