Tech Bros Have Found a New Creepy Way to Profit Off Your Health Anxiety

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The co-founder of Spotify wants you to start adding wellness into your daily mix. The latest venture of Swedish billionaires Daniel Ek (who co-founded the music streaming service) and Hjalmar Nilsonne, Neko Health , rolled out to the U.S. this week, and the waitlist has already topped 300,000, according to reporting from TechCrunch. Waitlist for what? , you might be asking yourself. Currently, the company offers a one-hour total body scan that uses its proprietary technology to screen for brewing problems in the blood, skin, and metabolism. Gym rats can check their body composition of fat and muscle, people with heart issues can get their heartbeat captured, and mole owners can get their moles mapped to 0.1 mm. It’s $500 for the hour, and it’s not covered by insurance , although it is Health Savings Account–eligible. A.I.-powered diagnostics distill all of this into one clear picture of your entire body, in 360-degree, piercing-into-the-soul, high-resolution detail.

Preventative health has had a major boom over the past few years, and it’s become a primary focus for plenty of tech executives who move into the health and wellness space. Money has been poured into startups focused on daily monitoring, early detection, diagnostics, and intervention. It’s hard not to see the tech industry’s influence in healthcare right now. Prenuvo, one of the first private health companies to popularize the total-body wellness scan , with clientele like Kim Kardashian, was originally backed by names like 23andMe’s CEO Anne Wojcicki; former Apple executive Tony Fadell, who created the iPod; and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Also, Cindy Crawford. Venture capital–backed wearables like Oura and Strava have raked in billions of dollars as they lure customers in with the promise of using data to fix all their annoying little bodily problems before they become an urgent-care-level issue. You can see a doctor at the Amazon Clinic or monitor your heartbeat on OpenAI’s Whoop or get erectile dysfunction pills and GLP-1s via the telehealth company Ro , brought to you by Reddit co-founder and Serena Williams’ husband Alexis Ohanian.

Here’s the thing about the Neko Health scan: It’s not an MRI, so it can’t see into your organs or skeleton and check for any issues happening there. It can help intervene with other issues—the founder of the meditation app Calm, Alex Tew, claims that it caught a malignant mole on his back—but it can’t do much beyond the kind of stuff you get checked out at your annual physical. Sure, for people with no health insurance, this is an enticing opportunity to effectively pay one month of coverage to get the silhouette of an annual physical, except without an actual doctor present. Full-body scans have also faced criticism from some healthcare professionals, who warn that the technology risks false positives, overdiagnoses, and unnecessary testing and anxiety.

Where Neko Health really has a financial window is for the people who are increasingly, perpetually scared of something going wrong before it does.