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

@synthesia-io created a digital twin of TechCrunch reporter Dominic-Madori Davis that can hold conversations and deliver scripts in her voice.

Dominic put it to the test and explored what digital twins could mean for the future of work.

Read the story and talk to Dominic’s digital twin yourself:

TechCrunch reporter Dominic-Madori Davis got a chance to find out. Synthesia created a digital twin of her that can hold conversations, along with an AI avatar that can deliver scripted lines in her voice.

It’s an impressive — and slightly surreal — look at where AI-generated video is heading. If a digital version of you can talk to clients, take calls, deliver the news, or interact with people on your behalf, what still needs to be done by the real you?

Dominic put the technology to the test and explored what digital twins could mean for the future of human-facing work.

Read the full story on TechCrunch: