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All-In · 2 min · Sep 28, 2026

Neko detects serious undiagnosed conditions in about 1% of members

Daniel Ek says Neko has completed more than 100,000 scans and finds serious undiagnosed conditions in about 1% of members. He says people with the poorest health status show the largest improvements, suggesting guided checkups can prompt action.

Daniel Ek

Daniel Ek is a Spotify cofounder and executive chairman; Neko Health cofounder.

Co-founded Spotify in 2006 and now guides its long-term strategy as executive chairman.

  • Chamath Palihapitiya, Host · Founder & CEO, Social Capital

    Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.

  • Jason Calacanis, Host · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH

    Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.

  • David Sacks, Host · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures

    PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.

  • David Friedberg, Host · CEO, Ohalo

    Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.

About this segment

Daniel Ek says Neko has completed more than 100,000 scans and finds serious undiagnosed conditions in about 1% of members. He says people with the poorest health status show the largest improvements, suggesting guided checkups can prompt action.

From “Daniel Ek: Life After Spotify, Broken Healthcare Incentives, Catching Disease Early & AI's Potential”, Sep 28, 2026. Watch the full episode

“around 1% of our members have a serious underlying medical situation that is undiagnosed that we discover.”
Daniel Ekat 18:14 · All-In18:14

Takeaways

  1. Neko has completed more than 100,000 scans.
  2. About 1% of members have a serious undiagnosed condition detected.
  3. Members with the poorest health status are improving the most.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:58Spotify secured label deals by guaranteeing their near-term budgets4:02
  2. 27:22Short insurer tenures discourage investment in preventionPro pick 4:05
  3. 19:37Longitudinal scans can track changes across hundreds of moles2:38
  4. 39:24Ek sees compute as one signal of AI capability3:18

  5. 17:30Neko detects serious undiagnosed conditions in about 1% of members2:10

  6. 47:31Stardoll cut page loads from four minutes to under a second2:29Up next
  7. 44:26Spotify supports open podcast feeds alongside platform features2:06

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 17:33

    And just the identification of things ahead of the curve, because I've heard of other, there was one medical, there was forward. I mean, there were a few other kind of attempts at making these integrated centers where you go in and get preventative checkups with their own instrumentation. And I think I've heard the thesis a little bit before. What have you identified that may be novel, Daniel, that we haven't seen in the past?

  2. 17:54

    I think first and foremost, the important thing to mention is, as I mentioned, we started this in 2018. So this company has been around for eight years, we've done more than 100,000 scans already. So we actually publish data every year. So we've just published our third year data survey, where we go through the health outcomes that we have across our members. And around 1% of our members have a serious underlying medical situation that is undiagnosed that we discover.

  3. 18:27

    So, you know, again, the good news is many of our members are healthy and we're just talking about improving their current health status. And as you correctly pointed out, a lot of that ends up coming around stress, around diet, around sleep, and those things. But the most encouraging thing we're finding now as we've done these studies for three years in a row is that the people with the worst health status are the ones that are improving the most. So it turns out that this ability of having a clear visual understanding of where you are in your health journey currently today and having a clinician that sits down with you explaining the situation and possible remedies to that is a huge benefactor for getting people to start improving things around lifestyle.

  4. 19:17

    So we've seen members that have gone from year where they've been smoking to not smoking as part of them having to do this NECO and prioritizing their health. We've obviously seen people with severe medical underlying illnesses that have gone from discovering those and then treating them and having much better overall health as a result.