Tandem Health’s $100m raise to scale globally

0:05Mike Butcher:Hello and welcome to Path Founders with me, Mike Butcher. We like to look at the code, the capital and the consequences behind the European startup ecosystem. Before we get into today's interview, let me remind you that we're building PathFounders Network, a curated, vetted community for the people building Europe's technology future, connecting Europe's fragmented startup ecosystem. Membership is by application or invitation. Every application is reviewed individually. Join pathfounders.com slash network and go there. Right. Swedish health tech startup Tandem Health has raised$100 million in Series B funding, led by EQT's€5 billion scale-up Europe fund, taking its total funding to$160 million.

0:57Mike Butcher:Kinovik, North Zone, Amino Collective and the Visionaries Club all invested in Tandem's$50 million Series A in 2025, and they're all participating in this round. Tandem started with an AI scribe designed to take the administrative burden off doctors, but its ambitions are now much bigger, quite clearly. It wants to build an AI-native operating system for healthcare spanning clinical documentation, coding, decision support, and eventually patient flow. The company says it is already used by more than 10 ,000 care organisations across 14 European markets, including the NHS in the UK. So can a European AI company really become the software layer underlying healthcare?

1:46Mike Butcher:To discuss the funding, the technology and what this means, I'm now joined by Dr Katie Baker, Tandem Health's Director for the UK and Ireland and also a former NHS GP. Thanks very much for joining us. Thanks, Mike. Great to be here. Um, Tandem started as an AI scribe. And now you're talking about a whole AI native clinic operating system. What does that actually mean, really? Yeah, it's a really good question. We're in it every day. So we it becomes our natural language. But what does it mean? Well, as you said, we started out with the medical scribe. And the aim of that was to structure in the consultation, the medical notes, and that we see as kind of the foundational layer.

2:33so going to a clinic operating system means looking at both upstream of that consultation and downstream so we want to be able to when a patient tries to contact the health system enable them to get the right person at the right time we want to be able to structure the data throughout that and then at the end like use our coding module to be able to code the interaction and enable the task to be done at the end so really create that kind of foundational layer for an organization to use their data to improve kind of patient care basically. I see.

3:08Mike Butcher:So it's sort of, is it the whole software layer around the clinician? So I think it interacts with multiple people within a health system. So the organization itself, the healthcare professional, whether that be a doctor, a nurse, a physiotherapist, mental health care professional and the patient. Obviously right now we're looking at the clinicians so we've used the Ambient Scribe to be able to assist a clinician in their appointment to write the note and write the downstream documentation but now it's kind of moving on to support the health organisation with their data at population health level as well as enable the patient for example to ring up and be able to book into an appointment and get to the right person at the right time.

3:52Mike Butcher:So clearly, it sounds like you've really piqued the interest of these healthcare organisations like the NHS. And you're also working with Accurex partnership in the UK. Does the sort of footprint look in the UK look similar to continental Europe? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. In fact, so we came to the UK in about October 2024 and saw rapid uptake across both the private and the public healthcare system. I think what we're seeing in the public side, which is obviously about 80 % of healthcare in the UK, is that we have that distribution across primary care, about 98 % of primary care, and also in about 75 NHS trusts at the moment.

4:37So we are seeing quite large uptake across the public health system and also seeing a growing amount of enterprise within the private system wanting to deploy this technology. we are seeing that across all of our European markets at the moment. And to be honest, and I've been in healthcare a little bit of time, the public system is moving much quicker than I would have expected across markets, to be honest.

5:00Mike Butcher:Yeah, as you said, you're a former NHS GP yourself. So when you have used the software as a GP, what kind of thoughts do you have? I mean, presumably you like it, but then again, it is your employer. But what exactly is it doing that instead of doctors now? Yeah, so, well, the reason I joined Tandem was because I've been there as a clinician. So I've been, you know, on the edge of burnout because you're trying to manage sometimes 24, 30 patients in a day. And then you're having to stay for hours after work to try and do documentation. sometimes you're having to make decisions of which referral do I do for which patient to be able to actually go home and sleep and then come back in the morning what does this do to support that well it allows you to have that documentation done by the end of the consultation it allows you to have the referral documents done by the end of the consultation and it allows you to actually focus and speak to your patient I think what's important to mention as a clinician as well as a huge responsibility that's needed with the rollout of this technology so it has very positive benefits like i've just mentioned which helps retain clinicians it also helps patients have a better interaction but we also need to ensure that this technology is regulated and monitored and because as healthcare professionals we need we have a duty to provide kind of the best care to our patients and so i've been looking at it from both lenses and to be really honest with you the reason I want to be at Tandem and driving this mission forward is because I feel like we have this inflection point in healthcare and we need clinicians and healthcare professionals to be part of this journey to make sure we do it right.

6:48Mike Butcher:Right, but also there's always been concerns about how AI can get things wrong and hallucinate and stuff. You know, what's the sort of accuracy of the platform, is it benefiting from the fact that it's a very niche vertical, that it's trained on a very specific arena? Yeah, it's a really good point. So there's a lot going on in the news right now about Frontier Models, right? But we've chosen a very specific swim name, which is healthcare, and then have built a system around that to really focus on getting these clinical notes and interactions accurate. We have a whole clinic, so we have 100 clinicians within the company itself helping build and monitor this, as well as we have three kind of class 2A regulated devices on the market, which means that we have to have external auditors looking at error rate, accuracy, what we're doing post-deployment, how we're surveilling this technology once it's gone into deployment.

7:48And, you know, errors do happen, and it's about how you iterate constantly with these models and improve them going forward and work with organizations to make sure that we're doing the best thing possible for the organization, patients and clinicians.

8:02Mike Butcher:Well, it's a very relevant discussion right now, isn't it, given all the talk about frontier models and AI agents going rogue. But back into your arena, you're doing this coding assistance and it's a lot of clinical decision support tools. You're also, as you said, you're being audited. But is the competitive moat for you guys, European regulation, things like that? You've also got the issue of US companies like Abridge. You've also got Nabla, a Paris-based startup, doing something similar-ish. Heidi Health in Australia has also raised to go into Europe. So, you know, what kind of competitive advantage do you have?

8:55Mike Butcher:And is it really just sort of, you know, relying on the regulators to sort things out? No, it's a really good point. And something we get asked often as people are trying to choose which company to be their partner in this kind of era that we're moving into. There's kind of three main things I would say which differentiate us. One is enterprise. So we're built for enterprise and large organizations from the beginning. You'll see some other organizations that are built kind of for more direct consumer kind of approach. But we feel like as we're moving into this AIO era in healthcare, we need to have been built structurally for that from the beginning, which allows us to deploy to tens of thousands of clinicians at a time.

9:35So that's one piece and one piece that made me join tandem over others when I first joined. The second thing you've already mentioned is the European mode. so europe as you know is hugely fragmented several companies have come in and left very quickly we've seen withdrawal of clinical decision support from europe as well due to regulation um so yes we're kind of built in europe for europe um and kind of using thinking about cloud infrastructure and regulation um really to to serve the uk and european market and the final thing is the clinicians so i mentioned we've got 100 clinicians in house um but really the key is not actually some technology, building the technology is important, right, and getting that right.

10:16But the second piece is how you deploy that, like how it's adopted, how it actually transforms healthcare. And so how we differentiate is having a large clinical team to help transform and deploy across health organisations as well.

10:28Mike Butcher:And what sort of reassurances do you have about privacy of information, where the data goes? You mentioned sovereignty, for instance. Yes. So we have actually on our website a trust centre so you can see all of our kind of data certifications, ISO certifications, etc. that shows you exactly. And we can kind of support you on seeing the data flow within our organisations. We take that very seriously to make sure that we're secure and built again, like we said, for Europe and the UK. Well, it is very interesting ultimately, isn't it? Because as you said, if it does help clinicians spend less time on administration, you're claiming 29 % less time, that has a very interesting upstream effect because the number of employees going into healthcare is flatlining, it's not where it should be so in other words we're set effectively getting more uh more efficiency out of an existing workforce is that right yeah i think it's if we look at the big problem right 10 of gdp spent on healthcare we've got an aging population not enough people support that's only going to get worse more chronic disease and globally a shortage of clinicians to serve in healthcare so this is a urgent problem now it's only going to get worse and and i see how ai if deployed properly if regulated and monitored properly we can impact that and start doing that now and it needs to not just be you know looking at um how much time is saved per clinical note it needs to be across that whole work stream like we mentioned of how are people accessing the system how are they getting to the right place at the right time how are we getting kind of good data quality in to be able to improve patient outcomes down the line as well so we've got a long way to go but that's our ambition is to help organizations in that kind of quest.

12:23Mike Butcher:Well I'm sure this won't be the last conversation we'll be having but thank you so much Dr Katie Baysker there from Tandem Health who've just raised a hundred million dollars Series B funding led by EQT's Scale Up Europe Fund and remember from me Mike Butcher at Path Founders join Path Founders Network go to pathfounders.com slash network we'll see you on the next podcast. Thank you.