A Neko Health investor on the $700M bet to scan your whole body

We have spent the last decade building software that tracks our every move, click, and purchase. Now, the capital is moving toward tracking what is happening inside our skin. The recent $700 million valuation milestone for Neko Health, the venture co-founded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, signals a massive shift in how investors view the human body: not as a biological mystery, but as a data set that needs regular indexing.

As a founder, you have to look past the shiny hardware and the massive funding rounds. When you see names like Ek and companies like Midjourney—a generative AI giant—stepping into the physical world of whole-body scanning, you aren't just looking at a new healthcare trend. You are looking at the next great infrastructure play. But before we get excited about living forever, we need to talk about why this is happening now and what it actually means for those of us building in the AI and crypto spaces.

The Preventive Health Gold Rush

For a long time, healthcare has been reactive. You wait until something hurts, you go to a doctor, and they try to fix it. It is a broken system that prioritizes crisis management over maintenance. Neko Health and competitors like Function Health are betting that consumers are tired of the wait-and-see approach. They are selling the idea of a 'check engine light' for the human body.

Neko’s specific approach involves a high-tech cabin equipped with dozens of sensors that can scan skin, heart, and circulation in minutes. It is fast, it is aesthetically pleasing, and it generates a mountain of data. The goal is early detection of things like skin cancer or cardiovascular issues before they become terminal or prohibitively expensive to treat. Investors are pouring hundreds of millions into this because the scalability of a subscription-based health monitoring service is significantly more attractive than the traditional, insurance-heavy medical model.

Why AI Giants are Moving into Biology

The most interesting part of this story isn't actually Neko Health—it is the fact that Midjourney is building a hardware division for body scanners. You might ask why an image generation company cares about your cardiovascular health. The answer is simple: pattern recognition. AI thrives on high-quality, high-resolution data. The more granular the data, the better the model.

For a builder, this is the takeaway: The next generation of AI will not be trained solely on the public internet or scrapings from Reddit. It will be trained on proprietary biological data. Companies like Midjourney realize that if they can control the hardware that captures the data, they own the foundation for the next century of medical breakthroughs. They aren't just building scanners; they are building the training sets for autonomous diagnostics.

The Skeptic's View: Data vs. Outcomes

Here is where I get a bit skeptical. Just because we have more data doesn't mean we have better health outcomes. We have seen this before in the wearable space. Millions of people wear rings and watches that tell them they slept poorly, yet they still feel tired. Data without an actionable, accessible pathway to improvement is just noise.

For these $700 million bets to pay off, these companies have to solve the 'so what?' problem. If a Neko scan finds a minor abnormality, does that lead to a life-saving intervention, or does it lead to a spiral of unnecessary biopsies and anxiety? In the tech world, we call this a false positive. In medicine, a false positive can lead to physical harm. As founders, if you are looking to enter this space, your value proposition shouldn't be 'more data.' It should be 'better decisions.'

The Infrastructure Play for Builders

If you are building in the crypto or AI space, you might feel like this is a hardware story that doesn't affect you. You’d be wrong. These scanning booths are essentially massive data ingestion points. They require secure, private ways to store and verify sensitive biological information. This is where decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) and zero-knowledge proofs come into play.

We are moving toward a world where you might 'own' your body scan data on a private ledger and grant temporary access to an AI model to run a diagnostic. The intersection of Neko’s hardware and decentralized identity is a massive, untapped market. The current centralized model—where a single company owns your full-body map—is a privacy nightmare waiting to happen. The opportunity for builders is to create the privacy layer that makes these scanners palatable to the public.

The Founder's Takeaway

Don't be distracted by the high valuations or the celebrity founders. The 'whole-body scan' market is a bet on the commoditization of medical expertise. If a machine can diagnose better than a general practitioner, the entire gatekeeper model of healthcare collapses. That is the disruption investors are chasing.

If you are starting something today, look at the bottlenecks. Neko is solving the data collection bottleneck. The next big winners will solve the data interpretation bottleneck and the data sovereignty bottleneck. Don't just build another sensor; build the system that makes the sensor's data trustworthy and private. The future of health isn't just about scanning the body; it's about who owns the map once it's drawn.

The human body is the final frontier of the data economy. We have mapped the globe and the web; now we are mapping ourselves. Make sure you're building the tools that protect the individual in that process.

Read the original at TechCrunch Startups →