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Earlier this week, I visited one of Paris’ few longevity clinics dedicated to preventative medicine — and the only one that describes itself as a tech startup.
Hidden behind an unassuming Haussmannian door, just a few minutes away from the Paris Opera, the centre has been operating for nine months. The startup behind it, Zoī, promises customers a “360-degree check-up’ — a three-hour series of tests and exams, ranging from blood tests to eye scans through spirometry and gut microbiome analyses.
The objective? Collect millions of data points on up to 200 biomarkers that are in turn analysed by an AI model, in order to deliver lifestyle recommendations that, promises Zoī, will prevent disease and improve customers’ long-term wellness.
“It’s not about adding years of life, but rather life to years,” says Zoī cofounder — and former special advisor to French president Emmanuel Macron — Ismaël Emélien. “The goal is to learn the body’s ‘user manual’ to prevent illnesses and enable people to live in good health for longer.”
It’s not for everyone. Membership to Zoī is €3.6k per year, which includes an annual checkup as well as the follow-up recommendations. That’s roughly the cost of a membership to Soho House, says Zoī's CFO Antoine Attali — and the startup's customers usually belong to the same social circles.
The clinic caters to premium needs, from snacks elaborated by world-famous chef Alain Ducasse to a balneotherapy section modelled on ‘Japanese thermal baths‘, featuring a snow cabin (?) and a mineral bath that is, I am told, “twice as salty as the Dead Sea”.
Attali tells me that in the long-term, Zoī hopes to become accessible to everyone, and that prices will go down to a similar level to your average WiFi subscription.
For now, though, preventative health remains a hobby of the upper-class. In fact, Zoī's investors are all private individuals; the company’s €20m seed round, which it raised in 2022, included a good number of high-profile billionaires such as Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé and Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel.
And Zoī is not the only longevity startup appealing to the ultra-rich. Spotify founder Daniel Ek is behind similar ventures, including Sand Clinic in Stockholm, where customers can receive full body check-ups and treatments ranging from vacuum therapy to red light saunas — with membership expected to cost between €1,000 and €10,000 a month.
Ek is also the founder of healthtech Neko Health, which has built a full-body scanner for health data collection that it says helps doctors detect potential diseases earlier. The company has a clinic in Stockholm and has just opened a new spot in London, right in the middle of Marylebone, where it prices a one-hour scan at £299 — almost double the price of a visit to the Stockholm clinic when it opened in 2023 (€180).
Despite the cost, the proposition seems appealing enough. Neko Health says it already has a waiting list of 22k people; Zoī says it has “around 1k members” to date and is currently carrying out a dozen check-ups per day — but the startup is confident that it can ramp up to reach its maximum capacity of 35k annual check-ups in the next five years.
Whether or not the preventative treatments promised by startups like Zoī, Neko Health and Sand Clinic will ever reach the masses remains to be seen; what seems certain for now is that billionaires won’t get tired of full-body-scanning anytime soon.
