Spotify Founder Bets $700M: Can Full-Body Scans Reshape Preventive Healthcare?

Spotify Billionaire Enters Health Tech

Neko Health, founded by Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek, has raised $700 million to build a new business around full-body scanning. The company has now officially launched in the United States, bringing its body scanning services across the Atlantic. As discussed on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Neko Health is far from alone — a wave of capital is pouring into the preventive healthcare space.

Neko Health's core thesis is straightforward: by conducting a fast, non-invasive full-body scan that collects vast amounts of health data, the company aims to detect potential risks before disease sets in. Compared to the traditional healthcare system's reactive model — where you only see a doctor when something's wrong — this kind of upstream health monitoring is being framed as a paradigm shift. For an entrepreneur who reshaped the music industry with a streaming subscription model, betting on "subscription-based health management" as his next venture makes intuitive sense.

Not Just Neko: The Preventive Healthcare Space Heats Up

Ek isn't the only one making this bet. According to TechCrunch, AI image generation company Midjourney is developing its own body scanning hardware, while Function Health has also raised significant capital to build out its own preventive healthcare platform.

When companies with wildly different backgrounds — from a streaming giant to an AI startup — converge on body scanning and preventive care as a core part of their roadmap, it signals strong investor conviction in the space.

Why Investors Are Going All In

Capital flooding into a nascent category typically stems from several compounding factors:

• Massive market potential: Healthcare spending accounts for a significant share of GDP in developed countries. If preventive care can replace some costly late-stage treatments, the addressable market is enormous.
• Data-driven business models: The longitudinal health data generated by full-body scans can drive subscription-based repeat engagement and long-term user retention — a model Ek knows well from his days at Spotify.
• Maturing AI technology: Advances in image recognition and large language models now make it possible to extract meaningful health signals from large volumes of scan data — which also explains why an AI company like Midjourney is entering the space.

Function Health is another player worth watching. Its model differs from Neko's: it centers on blood biomarker testing, offering annual subscription-based panels covering more than 100 health markers. Co-founded by Harvard Medical School professor Mark Hyman, it targets the gap between traditional checkups and precision medicine. Midjourney's move into hardware is more surprising — the company known for text-to-image generation is reportedly applying its image understanding capabilities to medical imaging analysis, aiming to use AI to read scan results and reduce the cost of human interpretation. The entry of both companies signals that the preventive healthcare space is no longer the exclusive domain of traditional medical players; tech companies are now treating their core technical capabilities as a springboard into medical data analysis.

Is a Body Scan Actually Worth It?

The central question raised on the Equity podcast is: is Neko Health's body scan actually worth it? It's also the question consumers care most about.

The value proposition of preventive healthcare is compelling — catch things early, intervene sooner, spend less. But these services also face real skepticism: How much genuinely actionable medical guidance can a single scan provide? Do the "abnormalities" it surfaces lead to overdiagnosis and unnecessary anxiety? And is the pricing accessible to everyday consumers? These questions remain unresolved — and they're precisely what will determine whether this model can truly succeed.

From an industry perspective, Neko Health's US launch is a critical market validation moment. The American healthcare system is expensive and fragmented, which creates room for preventive care — but regulation, insurance coverage, and consumer willingness to pay are all unavoidable hurdles.

Overdiagnosis is a long-standing academic controversy in the preventive healthcare field. Medical research has shown that large-scale screening of asymptomatic populations sometimes uncovers abnormalities of uncertain clinical significance — so-called "incidentalomas" — which can trigger a cascade of expensive follow-up tests and even unnecessary treatments, ultimately causing physical and psychological harm to patients while driving up overall healthcare costs. Full-body MRI scans, for instance, are not recommended by the American College of Radiology (ACR) as routine screening for asymptomatic healthy individuals, precisely because of high false-positive rates. For companies like Neko Health to earn the trust of the mainstream medical community, they will need to provide longitudinal data showing that their scan results translate into measurable health improvements — not just "finding more things."

A New Category Taking Shape

Whatever the ultimate verdict, one thing is clear: a preventive healthcare category driven by billionaire entrepreneurs, AI companies, and health-focused startups is taking shape. It carries the grand narrative of "using technology to reshape medicine," but it also needs to find the right balance between actual clinical efficacy, cost, and consumer trust.

For consumers, the more measured approach right now may be to treat body scans as a complement to — rather than a replacement for — traditional checkups, focus on the specific, actionable health guidance they provide, and then decide whether the expense is justified.