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.
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Chapters
00:00 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 (sorry, not SF yet)
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
