A Neko Health investor on the $700M bet to scan your whole body

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raised $700 million (techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/daniel-eks-body-scan…) to build a business around scanning your body, but it’s not the only company centering its roadmap around a new kind of preventative healthcare. Midjourney is building its own body scanner (midjourney.com/medical/blogpost), while Function Health (functionhealth.com) has also raised significant capital to build out its preventative-health platform. Why are investors betting so big on this category?

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity (techcrunch.com/podcasts/equity) podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis talks with Farooq Abbasi (prefaceventures.com/farooq-abbasi), founder and general partner of Preface Ventures and an investor in Neko Health, about how Neko compares with other consumer-health startups. They discuss what has to happen for body scanning to become part of the broader healthcare system.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

• Why Farooq invested in Neko after trying the company's scan himself

• What Neko's $500 scan actually includes, and how the company keeps the price down

• Why Farooq thinks low primary-care utilization is one of the biggest problems in U.S. healthcare

• Why some consumer-health startups may be overfunded, in Farooq's view

• How better health data could open the door to a new generation of AI-powered healthcare

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Chapters:

00:00 — Can Tech Reinvent Preventative Healthcare?
01:44 — Why Spotify’s Founder Built Neko Health
06:22 — Why Healthcare Is So Hard to Fix
08:23 — Inside a $500 Neko Health Scan
12:35 — Can Preventative Healthcare Scale?
14:20 — The Risks of VC-Backed Healthcare
17:28 — How AI Is Changing Medicine
22:55 — Is AI in Healthcare Worth the Risk?

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