Neko Health, the body-scanning startup co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek, has arrived in the United States, and it is arriving in a category that has suddenly become crowded.
The Swedish company has raised $700 million to build a business around scanning the whole body, betting that preventive diagnostics will migrate from the annual physical at a doctor's office to a data-rich, consumer-facing scan. Its pitch rests on volume and speed: a scan produces far more measurements than a routine checkup, and the company argues that pattern-finding across that data can catch disease earlier.
It is not alone. Midjourney, the image-generation company, is building its own body scanner, and Function Health has raised significant capital to build out a preventive-health platform. Why investors are betting so heavily on the category was the subject of the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, in which Farooq Abbasi of Preface Ventures and an investor in Neko discussed what has to happen before body scanning becomes part of mainstream healthcare, and how the company's expansion from its Stockholm home base — not San Francisco — has shaped the rollout.
The conversation also turned to the uncomfortable economics of consumer health: the risk that a company funded as a subscription business ends up optimizing for subscribers rather than patients, and what 'winning' looks like in a sector where the common exit is an IPO rather than an acquisition. Rising interest in vertical AI in medicine came up as well, as clinical tools trained on medical literature start reaching clinicians directly.
As preventive care draws in both incumbents and newcomers, the open question is no longer whether scans can be sold. It is whether the findings they produce change what a health system does next — and who pays for that follow-up.
