Full-Body Scans Are the Next Big Health Tech Bet, and Investors Are Paying Up

Preventative healthcare has become one of the hottest places to put venture money, and Neko Health is the clearest sign yet. The startup, co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek, has raised $700 million to build a business around scanning the human body. It has now come to America.

Neko is not working alone. Midjourney, better known for AI image generation, is developing its own body scanner. Function Health, which offers testing as part of a broader preventative-health platform, has also raised significant capital. Together the three show how many well-funded companies are betting that people will pay to check on their health before anything goes wrong.

The appeal for investors is easy to see. Traditional healthcare mostly reacts to illness. A consumer product that promises early signals, sold as a recurring service, looks a lot like the subscription businesses tech investors already understand. It also taps a growing wave of interest from healthy, affluent people who want to track their own data the way they track their sleep or workouts.

The harder question is whether a scan is actually worth it. Critics of consumer screening often point out that testing healthy people can turn up ambiguous findings, prompt follow-up tests and create anxiety without clear benefit. Whether these products improve outcomes, rather than simply producing more data, is something the companies will eventually have to show.

That tension was the focus of a recent episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, which asked why investors are betting so heavily on the category and whether the price of entry is justified. The size of Neko's round suggests backers believe the market is large. What remains unproven is whether customers, and the medical evidence, will back that belief up in the US.

For now, the US launch gives American consumers their first real chance to judge the pitch for themselves, and gives the industry a test of whether a model built on preventative scanning can travel beyond its home market.