SkinBit raises $6M to bring 20-minute full-body skin cancer screening to clinics across America

A melanoma diagnosis changed Jonathan Benassaya’s life. Now the Deezer co-founder is betting $6 million in fresh funding on a simple idea: skin cancer screening should depend less on luck and more on data.

SkinBit, a health tech startup building a full-body skin imaging system, has raised $6 million in pre-seed funding from Boost VC, Cleo Capital, Manna Ventures, and Profluent Capital. Lyft co-founder Logan Green and nine board-certified dermatologists participated in the round.

Deezer co-founder raises $6M for SkinBit after his own melanoma was caught by accident

The startup plans to put its scanners inside dermatology practices, longevity clinics, and med spas, where patients can receive a full-body scan in about 20 minutes. The images are reviewed by board-certified dermatologists and stored to create a patient-owned record that can be compared with future scans.

That last piece may prove just as significant as the scanner itself.

A melanoma diagnosis sparked the idea

Benassaya, who previously co-founded music streaming company Deezer and later held senior product roles at Life360 and Meta, was diagnosed with melanoma in 2020.

His cancer was discovered almost by chance.

A dermatologist noticed a lesion beneath Benassaya’s mask while leaving the examination room. The spot had reportedly been there for years.

“I got lucky,” Benassaya said, “but health shouldn’t rely on luck. No one should die of a cancer you can see.”

The experience exposed a weakness in routine skin exams that SkinBit is trying to address. Doctors can inspect a patient’s skin during an appointment, but tracking subtle changes across hundreds or thousands of spots over several years becomes much harder without a consistent visual record.

“Skin is the largest and most cancer-prone organ, and somehow it’s the one we track the least. There are multiple modalities to image our internal organs, but skin is still left to a doctor’s memory,” Benassaya said.

Skin cancer screening has an access problem

Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States, with roughly 5.4 million diagnoses annually. New melanoma diagnoses have risen 42% over the past decade, according to figures cited by SkinBit.

Early detection can dramatically change the outcome. Five-year survival for melanoma detected before it spreads is above 99%, according to American Cancer Society data.

Getting examined can be another matter.

SkinBit points to research showing an average dermatology appointment wait of 34.5 days. The U.S. has about 3.7 dermatologists per 100,000 people, with access far worse outside major population centers. A 2018 study found that 88% of rural U.S. counties had no dermatologist.

SkinBit wants its distributed scanner network to help close part of that gap.

SkinBit (Credit: SkinBit)

Patients whose scans raise concerns can be referred to dermatologists with imaging data already available for review. The goal isn’t to replace dermatologists, but to give them a richer record and potentially extend the number of patients they can evaluate.

“Dermatology has always been rooted in vigilance, but vigilance is stronger with data behind it. SkinBit gives my patients a longitudinal record I can build on, visit after visit. It’s the kind of tool that makes a thorough exam even more precise,” said Dr. Stephanie Campbell, a board-certified dermatologist at Campbell Dermatology in Oregon.

SkinBit’s bigger bet is the data

SkinBit joins a broader shift in consumer health from occasional measurements to continuous records.

Apple Watch tracks cardiovascular signals. Oura has pushed sleep and recovery data into the mainstream. Function Health is building around recurring blood testing. SkinBit sees an opening to apply a similar longitudinal model to skin.

Each scan creates a baseline. Future scans can then be compared against earlier images, creating a history of how a person’s skin changes over time.

That could become SkinBit’s most valuable asset if the company reaches enough patients. A growing collection of longitudinal images could help clinicians spot changes that are difficult to identify during isolated annual exams and could eventually support better computational tools for skin analysis.

The company has assembled some notable clinical expertise around that bet. Co-founder and medical advisor Dr. Justin Ko is Stanford’s Chief of Medical Dermatology. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Sancy Leachman previously chaired dermatology at Oregon Health & Science University and created a large public collection of skin images used for AI research.

Nine dermatologists investing their own money in the pre-seed round gives the company another signal of clinical interest.

From three locations to a national network

SkinBit plans to have its first three locations operating in 2026 and expects to reach 15 locations by the end of 2027. The company says more than 20 potential locations are already in discussions and its waitlist has passed 5,000 people without paid marketing.

Those early numbers don’t prove the model yet. SkinBit still has to show that consumers will repeatedly pay for scans, clinics will integrate the system into existing workflows, and its imaging approach produces meaningful clinical benefits at scale.

The opportunity is easy to see.

Medicine has sophisticated ways to look inside the human body. Skin sits right in front of us, yet physicians often have surprisingly little historical data showing how it changed from one year to the next.

SkinBit is betting that a 20-minute scan can start filling in that missing history.