A Swedish healthtech startup just put the entire AI healthcare industry on notice. Tandem Health CEO Lukas Saari says US competitors will find it “very difficult” to crack the European market, and a string of landmark deals is making that claim very hard to argue against.

The European Identity That US Rivals Cannot Copy

Speaking on the Tech.eu podcast, Saari was direct. “We have very much taken the full European focus, we are a full-on European company,” he said. “Everyone is based here; we only have European-based investors.”

That identity is now a genuine commercial edge. In procurement discussions, European governments and public health services are increasingly choosing European-built solutions over US-based alternatives.

Saari’s comments arrive at a pivotal moment. Tensions between the US and Europe under President Trump have pushed institutions to rethink their dependence on American technology. In November 2025, all 27 EU member states signed a formal declaration demanding stronger European digital sovereignty. This is no longer just political posturing. It is now driving real purchasing decisions in healthcare, one of the continent’s most sensitive sectors.

Tandem’s all-European structure was never accidental. The company was founded in Stockholm in 2023 by Lukas Saari, Oliver Åstrand, and Oscar Boldt-Christmas. Saari previously led McKinsey’s Nordic healthcare digitisation and AI practice. Åstrand conducted AI research at Google X and Uber. Boldt-Christmas served as a Senior Partner leading McKinsey’s European healthcare practice for 20 years. That combined experience gave Tandem an edge in navigating the cultural and regulatory complexity that regularly trips up US entrants.

European AI healthtech startup beating US rivals in NHS

“It would be very difficult for US-based competitors to come into Europe and compete.”
Lukas Saari, CEO and Co-founder, Tandem Health

Solving the NHS Admin Crisis One Consultation at a Time

Tandem’s biggest market right now is the UK, where NHS clinicians are using its AI co-pilot to fight through an overwhelming paperwork crisis.

The NHS deployment scale is staggering. Through a partnership with UK communications platform Accurx, Tandem’s technology is now accessible to over 200,000 NHS staff. The Accurx Scribe feature, built on Tandem’s AI engine, has been rolled out to 98 percent of GP practices already using Accurx. It writes directly back into medical record systems EMIS and SystmOne, making it one of the largest AI scribe deployments in healthcare anywhere in the world.

Accurx CEO Jacob Haddad framed the urgency clearly: “NHS staff are spending nearly a third of their day on admin, and they’re being let down by inefficient ways to communicate.”

The UK government’s NHS 10-Year Plan has now explicitly signalled its intention to scale AI scribe technology across the health service. That policy direction is a major tailwind for Tandem, which plans to roll out to an additional 230,000 NHS staff in secondary care settings including acute hospitals and mental health trusts.

The Admin Burden That Is Breaking Clinicians Everywhere

The problem Tandem is solving is not a minor frustration. Research shows clinicians now spend nearly half of their workday on documentation and administrative tasks rather than on actual patient care.

A survey of 6,000 clinicians and patients across Europe by Tandem itself confirmed the depth of the crisis. Admin has grown into a second shift for many doctors, stretching into evenings and weekends. Around a third of clinicians in key European markets report burnout symptoms directly tied to documentation overload.

Key stats behind the admin crisis:

• 97% of patients believe clinicians should spend less time on admin and more time on care
• Physician burnout costs healthcare systems an estimated $4.6 billion annually in the US alone
• Clinicians spend 5 to 10 minutes documenting after each patient visit on average
• A 30-day ambient AI scribe trial reduced clinician burnout from 51.9% to 38.8% in one study
• Capio research showed Tandem’s AI scribe cut documentation time by 29% across European clinics

Tandem’s ambient AI scribe listens quietly during the patient consultation. It transcribes the conversation, generates a structured draft note, and transfers it into the medical record with a single click.

That process cuts documentation time from 5 to 10 minutes per patient down to just 1 to 2 minutes. Clinicians using the tool report saving up to two hours every single day.

Psychologist Louise Lind, a Tandem user, put it simply: “I expected AI would save time, but I did not realize how much it would improve the quality of my sessions.”

From Medical Notes to a Full Healthcare Operating System

Tandem started with one specific problem: medical note-taking. Today, it is building something far bigger.

The platform has evolved into a full medical assistant. It now covers referral notes and patient communications before, during, and after clinical visits. The company’s Coding Assistant has received MDR Class IIa medical device certification, raising the compliance bar for AI in clinical documentation significantly.

In January 2026, Tandem acquired Juvoly, a leading Dutch AI medical scribe, expanding its reach across the Netherlands. The company now has active operations in the Nordics, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Estonia, and the Netherlands. It is used by more than 1,000 healthcare organisations across Europe. The team has grown to around 170 people.

The funding to fuel all of this came in July 2025. Tandem closed a $50 million Series A round led by Kinnevik, with participation from Northzone, Amino Collective, and Visionaries Club. That brought the company’s total funding to over $59 million, with a stated commitment that a significant portion would go toward driving AI innovation within the NHS.

The long-term vision Saari keeps coming back to is an AI-native operating system for healthcare. A system where every note, referral, coding decision, and patient communication happens automatically in the background. A system where a doctor walks into the consultation room, focuses entirely on the patient, and barely needs to touch a screen.

The AI healthcare market is projected to reach $143 billion globally by 2033, growing at nearly 38 percent annually. Tandem is building to own a dominant share of that growth in Europe specifically. With a fully European team, GDPR-compliant infrastructure, a growing NHS footprint, and a procurement climate that now openly favours local providers, Saari’s confidence is not arrogance. It is strategy.

As European healthcare systems battle rising costs, ageing populations, and a workforce pushed to its limits, the companies that understand European complexity from the inside out will ultimately win. Tandem Health appears to have built exactly that advantage and built it quietly, one medical note at a time. What do you think: does being a European-built company give Tandem a real long-term edge over US rivals? Share your thoughts in the comments below.