In today’s fast-paced healthcare world, clinicians face overwhelming administrative duties. On average, healthcare workers spend about 13.5 hours weekly on documentation — over a third of their workweek — marking a 25% increase over the past seven years. Tandem Health identified an opportunity to innovate with an AI-driven “clinician co-pilot” that automates these demanding tasks, enabling doctors and nurses to focus on patient care.
Recently, the company secured $50 million in a Series A funding round led by Kinnevik and supported by Northzone, Amino Collective, and Visionaries Club. This funding will accelerate expansion and product development, establishing Tandem as a key player in Europe’s digital healthcare evolution. The AI healthcare market is expected to reach $143.02 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 37.91%.
Meet the founders: Bridging medicine and technology
Founded in 2023, Tandem Health boasts a team with outstanding credentials that combines healthcare and technology expertise. CEO and co-founder Lukas Saari previously led McKinsey’s Nordic healthcare digitisation and AI practice and has experience working on machine learning at Spotify. The founding team also includes CTO Oliver Åstrand, an AI researcher at GoogleX and Uber who developed AI products at startups Depict and Mavenoid, and CCO Oscar Boldt-Christmas, a former Senior Partner at McKinsey who led the European healthcare practice for 20 years.
The Tandem Health team’s profound understanding of healthcare challenges makes it particularly compelling. Oscar Boldt-Christmas, who joined as a third co-founder after his long career at McKinsey, is driven by his belief in AI’s potential to reduce healthcare administrative burdens.
Motivated by the frustrations of overworked healthcare professionals, the founders of Tandem Health aimed to develop a solution that empowers clinicians with intelligent, user-friendly AI tools. Their mission is not just to reduce burnout and enhance patient outcomes, but also to make healthcare more sustainable. Their distinctive hiring approach, seeking ‘doctor-preneurs’ — clinicians with medical backgrounds and entrepreneurial experience — has resulted in what CEO Lukas Saari calls ‘probably the most expensive customer support team in the world,’ with over 80% of members being clinicians.
Behind Tandem: AI that speaks the language of healthcare
Tandem’s technology is powered by advanced large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Whisper, which enable real-time transcription and structuring of patient consultations. The platform acts as an “ambient scribe,” listening to doctor-patient conversations and instantly generating draft medical notes for seamless EHR integration.
Unlike many competitors focused on the US market, Tandem is explicitly built to address the complexities of European healthcare. The platform handles multiple languages, adapts to various EHR templates, and is designed with strict GDPR compliance. Given the market’s fragmentation and regulatory requirements, this European focus is a crucial aspect of our strategy.
Tandem stands out with its comprehensive onboarding, ongoing training, and live support. Team members with clinical backgrounds often provide this support, ensuring that even the least tech-savvy clinicians can confidently use the platform.
The road ahead: Scaling the future of healthcare
Tandem is on a rapid growth trajectory. The company plans to enter new markets, including Italy, and expand its already impressive customer base. It now serves over 1,000 healthcare organisations across the Nordics, the UK, Germany, France, and Spain. With plans to double its team size in the next six months, Tandem is investing heavily in product development and customer support.
Looking ahead, Tandem is developing revolutionary new features like a “medical ChatGPT” for GDPR-compliant use and agentic AI that automates documentation distribution. The ultimate vision? An “AI native operating system” for clinics, where administrative tasks are fully automated and clinicians can focus entirely on patient care.
As CEO Lukas Saari envisions, clinicians should be able to “come into their consultation room in the morning, meet patients all day long and barely need to interact with their computer”.
