Lukas Saari, Co-founder and CEO of Tandem Health: Tackling admin in healthcare

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Thank you for following along. Today we've got a great conversation from our time at Slush and the conversation is supported by Databricks, whose unified platform power source on everyone's FY2026 target, becoming a truly AI-driven company, and Harmonic. Harmonic is the startup discovery engine used by leading VCs across the world to find their fun returners. Check them both out. Thank you. Hello and welcome back. I am here with Lukas, the co-founder and CEO of Tandem Health, One of the most exciting companies coming out of Stockholm at the moment.

0:31Stockholm is having an absolutely insane moment. The Swedish ecosystem is absolutely crushing it. So thank you for joining me. It's great to have you here. Thank you for that intro. Great to be here. How are you finding Slush so far? Actually, I arrived at Slush now 20 minutes ago. So this is the first time I'm inside Slush. Strange scaling Europe. But I've had a bunch of other side events and some customer meetings also, given that we've expanded into Finland with Tandem. Very cool. We're going to get into all of it. for those who are not familiar with tandem health can you talk a bit about like what you've built so at tandem we think it's insane that clinicians spend 40 of their time on admin that could be spent with patients instead so developing essentially an ai medical assistant that helps doctors write medical notes and do other documentation connected to the care visits so how can doctors spend less time on admin more time on care and also provide care with even better quality so founded a company a bit over two years ago been an exciting journey since then now supporting more than a thousand care organizations we've expanded to 10 different countries uh we've raised a bit over 50 million in funding and uh grown from being 20 people at the beginning of this year to now being around 100 people so wow exciting times with lots of stuff happening there's so much to get into can we pick up on that last point scaling from 20 to 100 people how have you found that as the leader of an organization have you struggled to maintain quality of employees to maintain a strong culture can you talk a bit about that yeah i mean i think for me as a founder one of the most exciting parts of the journey is also that i get to scale with my company and i get to go through the various growing phases and learn from those and i think the team size growing is one of the very key parts of that of how do you go from like everyone having a joint stand-up in the beginning to now having like distributed across many different countries and having it split up and so on like how do you think about the organizational structure that you set up how do you think about the ceremonies that you run and similar this is something that I spend a lot of time thinking on on both how to do setups also how to do the hiring I think that's the most essential thing to get right and that the people that we hire now at this stage I mean are the people that will build the company for many years to come.

2:46And how is your time split? You know, are you focused on hiring more than you are on product, on product more than you're on sales? How does your time split look at the moment? So I have two co-founders, one that is CTO leading the tech products and then one that's chief commercial officer leading the sort of commercial parts. And then I'm a bit in between, so being the bridge between that, being involved in the most important efforts and then also driving a lot when it comes to like marketing, when it comes to finance, when it comes to legal, when it comes to hiring and talents and so on. Bit of everything then.

3:17Yeah, that's the fun part of it. Can you talk a bit about, you mentioned you're in 10 countries. Can you talk about kind of which countries you've been able to see success in? And then also, who are your clients? Are these private care providers? Are you dealing as well with government organizations and government providers? Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah. So we started out of Sweden, and then our expansion model has been finding an excellent country director to run the local sales and commercial efforts to both do the zero-to-one step, but also can do the scaling step afterwards. So for example, Carol that we have in Germany, like medical doctor by background, was a founder CEO of her own health tech company, was at BCG for a couple of years, was the managing director of another health tech company expanding into Germany and so on.

4:03So like people that really have a track record and experience for doing this. The main other markets that we're in now is the UK. We have a team of 10 in London. We have five people in Germany, five in France, four in Madrid, and then people in all of the other Nordic countries, and then also one in the Middle East pursuing that. So you're running these countries, like boots on the ground, teams there. Is that difficult for you, kind of, you know, having teams spread out all over Europe? How do you manage to sort of keep the team motivated and united on a single vision? so i think very important how you set yourselves up to enable that so that you have a cohesive culture cohesive way of working everyone feels that they're working towards the same mission as well i mean we're for example dedicating a lot of effort into like going on off sites twice per year where we gather the full team having also regular gatherings at least on a quarterly basis where everyone comes to stockholm for a winter party or some other setting or similar we have a company all hands every week where we gather the full team and go through the most exciting things that have happened and what we've learned from it and then i also travel around quite a lot so i was in munich last week i was in paris three weeks ago going to london now next week and so on so that's also part of the job yeah it makes total sense and um i always want to talk about the companies that you're selling to so you know healthcare has a reputation for being bureaucratic or slow moving and yet we're seeing companies like yours who have been able to scale rapidly on board dozens and dozens hundreds of users and customers what's been your experience selling to and onboarding kind of healthcare clients yeah i think what we have that is quite unique in healthcare i mean is that now with ai the technology is so transformative in terms of what it enables um we have a product that the decision makers love because they see the productivity gains but we also have a product that the individual users the doctors love because it solves the number one pain point that they have in their day which is that they are sitting multiple hours and doing note-taking instead of meeting patients so we both get this top down but also more of the bottom-up approach for it and getting more of that virality and then also i mean solving the pain point that they have and doing something that just enhances their current way of working without needing to replace too many things also makes it a lot simpler.

6:28So I think it's really about how do you find the right use case and develop a product that people really love. And how do you go about thinking about that, your product roadmap more generally? Are you spending a lot of time with doctors, seeing them use their product? Are you close to them? How are you designing your product roadmap? So when we started Tandem, we initially spoke to all doctors that we knew, understanding what are the key pain points and similar that we can help solve and then been working as closely as possible to our users so like six weeks after funding the company we went live with our first pilot clinics one primary care clinic and one mental health clinic then spoke to those literally every single day for multiple months to iterate on the product and really be user obsessed and i think one of the parts here that really helps is that almost our entire commercial team also has a medical background so it's doctors on the team that are part of doing both the sales but then also are part of doing the product development because in the end a doctor that is a bit techie is much better at how do you do the prompt engineering for writing the perfect medical notes as opposed to a software engineer because the software engineer don't know how you write a medical notes yeah and we're seeing that across all these sort of like vertical air industries whether it's legal coding you know doctors the context required is so important that you're able to input that into the product development.

7:50I also want to talk about the European tech ecosystem more generally and also Stockholm and Sweden. You're building from Stockholm, you're building from Sweden. What are your views on European tech at the moment? Do you think we're in a great place, not good enough? Just tell me what you think. I mean, I think that there's challenges in terms of being quite fragmented across the countries. We see and feel the pains of this a lot. in terms of having not only the European-wide regulations to adhere to, but also having local regulations in every single country that has their own takes on it and their own certifications that you need to do for selling in the public sector and similar.

8:34But I think also if you know how to navigate this, this can also be more of a competitive differentiator and a strength instead. Because it is complex, but it is possible at the same time. And we do see a lot of synergies from being active across European countries as well. I mean, both in terms of say that like the UK is perhaps two years more mature than the French market when it comes to what we do. How can we then compete in the UK that is the most competitive market in Europe and then bring the learnings from that to the other countries that we're active in. And then we have a massive head start compared to other competitors there.

9:10That's super interesting. So the UK is sort of ahead in terms of its adoption of AI tools and technology. and so you're able to take the learnings from there and actually bring the other countries up to speed quicker. Yeah, exactly. And then, I mean, by us having the experience of having done at-scale rollouts that are significantly bigger than any rollout that has happened in the other country, we also have a lot to bring to the table for how can you sort of kickstart that country and really launch it a lot quicker. Interesting. And, you know, you've spoken before about building from Europe and taking pride in building in Europe.

9:42One of the things that people always talk about is whether or not building in Europe is building on hard mode. And that people say, you know, less available capital, it's harder to sell to customers. I wanted to get your take on that. Do you think building in Europe is building in hard mode? I mean, I think hard mode to some extent, but it has different challenges, I would say, also to build in the US. So for what we do, I see Europe being more lucrative than the US. We are very explicitly not going to the US, but rather being all in European focus. And partly seeing that the US is also a lot more competitive in this space.

10:22There are multiple companies that have been around for longer that have billion dollar valuations already. And also on the system landscape that there's essentially two medical record systems that you become dependent on that you need to integrate with. And that puts you in a much weaker position as opposed to in Europe where it's fragmented. which presents challenges in terms of fragmentation, so it's more difficult to get started. But it also means that it's more defensible in the long term and that you can build something potentially much greater also here. Interesting. And when you look at the European ecosystem versus the US, are there things that you think we should be taking inspiration from?

11:03Are there things that we should be thinking, the Americans are doing this so well, we need more of this here in Europe? So I was to San Francisco for the first time two months ago, roughly. How was it? It was great. I mean, one of the key takeaways being really how people dream and think a lot bigger there. And I think that's a mentality that we should bring to Europe more as well. Where like the norm is that I'm expecting that I will conquer the entire world with what I'm building. It's like on a different scale than what you meet founders thinking in most of the European countries. So we need a bit more of that ambition and that sort of the dreaming as well, you know, and supporting each other.

11:40I want to talk about Sweden, right? The ecosystem right now is crazy. It feels like, you know, we're seeing round after round come out, but, like, you know, in the AI company level, like, really interesting companies being built by kind of Swedish people here in Stockholm. We're seeing the same in, like, Breakout, Late Stage, Lovable, Lugora, Sana. We're seeing so many companies come out. What do you think is going on right now in Stockholm that is, like, enabling this amazing ecosystem to thrive? I think the Swedish and Stockholm ecosystem is at this like sweet spot of a size where it's sufficiently big to have talented and visionary people but it's also sufficiently small that you get a really tight-knit community so I mean like I'm having dinner on Saturday with the founders of those three companies that you mentioned from Lovable, Ligora and Sana for example and everyone in Stockholm also has this mentality that you really want to pay it forward and help the next generation of founders so i mean for me it's been incredibly valuable to see sort of the previous generation of founders dream big succeed in that and then pay that forward and sort of teach me the ropes that they learned a couple of years earlier and are you starting to see the next generation come up are you you know you starting to are you at that point in your journey where you're able to pass it on yeah i've been starting to do that and i love doing that also i mean i I think it's super exciting to see the next generation of founders coming up and seeing how can I do my part in contributing to what they do also.

13:10Amazing. And do you think there are key things that we could learn from Stockholm? You know, we have, you know, one of the things I think frustrates me about Europe is that we have so much talent. We have a lot of capital. We have amazing ecosystems, builders, but we have them all over the place, right? And like America is amazing because you've got San Francisco and you've got New York and everybody's in one of those two places, mainly San Francisco. so the density of talent the density of people who are just passionate about this world is insane whereas we've got london which is sparsely populated we've got stockholm which is an amazing ecosystem then we've got paris munich berlin turin everything what do you think these other ecosystems can learn from stockholm right now i mean i think in terms of the talent density i mean you only need like five ten really talented people in a country or in a city to build something great right so i wouldn't see that as the primary rate limiting factor i think also one of the benefits or like advantages that sweden has it is also sufficiently small that you think global from day one pretty much whereas if you start out in germany or in france then you're more satisfied to start in your home country for four years and then you potentially expand somewhere else and if you expand somewhere else you will not be expanding to the nordics and smaller countries such as Sweden you will be expanding to the US instead so I think that also is something that is a different mindset for Swedish founders and that you think big at a different scale also from the beginning yeah yeah interesting and then when you look to the future of your journey you're already live in like 10 countries you're expanding rapidly what is it what else do you want to achieve where are you looking next is it more market expansion is it more product development how are you thinking about the next two years i mean i'm looking to make tandem a generational company love it that will in the minds of europeans be almost like synonymous with ai in healthcare and tandem and how healthcare will be completely revolutionized in the coming couple of years in terms of what does workflows look like and how do you deliver help deliver it and this is something that's needed as well i mean you have now like an aging population you have healthier costs that are rising every year that passes you have shortest clinicians all over the world so also if nothing is significantly improved healthcare will be a lot worse in a couple of years and i think ai and technology can really be the solution to this challenge love it well thank you so much for joining me i love you know watching your journey you're one of the most exciting startups in europe at the moment so best of luck with it all thank you so much

15:51Thank you.