Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raised $700 million 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, while Function Health 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’s Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis talks with 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.
Episode Chapters
- 0:00 — Intro
- 1:44 — From Spotify to Neko Health: the pitch that got him investing
- 6:22 — Why preventative care is so hard to access
- 8:23 — Inside a Neko scan
- 12:03 — Scaling from Sweden to the world
- 14:20 — The dark side of VC-backed health: subscribers, not patients
- 19:14 — Open Evidence and the rise of vertical AI in medicine
- 22:00 — IPO or bust? What “winning” looks like in healthcare
- 24:12 — Outro
The full episode is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Spotify. You can also follow the show on X and Threads at @EquityPod.
