00:00:00 · Sebastian Johnson, Lukas Saari
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. Today, we have got a repeat guest, Lukas, for his second appearance on the podcast. He's very excited. We caught up at the end of last year slash. Now you're back with some very exciting news. Lukas, take it away. What's going on? What are you announcing today? [00:00:14] S1: So today, we are very excitingly announcing our 100,000,000 series b that is being led by the Scale-up Europe Fund that's managed by EQT to now really enable us to take the next step to take care of European health care and bring it into the AI era. [00:00:31] S0: Let's go. Absolutely amazing. You've become... You know, what... You're part of this generation of phenomenal companies that's coming out of Stockholm. All of you have grown like crazy, and this is, an amazing validation for you on on your journey. Tell us bit about the ramp. You know? Where did it come from? How did the Scale-up Fund get involved? What unlocked it?
00:00:47 · Lukas Saari
[00:00:47] S1: Yeah. I mean, so for me, capital has always been a means to go faster and accelerate further. So what we felt now during the past couple of months was that we've started hitting the milestones we wanted to hit in terms of now having expanded to be in 14 different countries across Europe, having laid, like, the local foundation with the teams in place, having the lighthouse logos in place, and now it's just like, how can we scale that go to market engine faster? Faster? And also on the product side with having now grown from an initial AI medical scribe that is only in the background, like a meeting note taker when a doctor meets the patient, transcribes, generate a draft medical notes, and now having built out towards what is rather a complete AI medical assistant that also summarizes the patient history before the visit, does clinical decision support in real time during the visit and after the visit, not just as the note, but also does the referral, does the coding, does the prescription and so on. So also seeing here that on the product side, it's now time to take further the next step towards rider building what is an AI native operating system of a clinic. So how do we also handle, like, the incoming patients with having an AI receptionist that receives the phone calls for triaging scheduling? And how do you also support a clinic with other tasks as we're now bringing European healthcare into the AI era.
00:02:03 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:02:03] S0: Amazing. So there's two things there. Go to market, wanna accelerate, and then product... This product road map. We can talk about both of those. On the go to market side, you have ramped up. You're working with, and you tell me, like, so many clinicians, especially in The UK, it's so widely used. What is the go to market motion, and what does that process look like when you're essentially trying to getting into clinicians, which is probably not your typical software buyer, AI tool procurer. Right?
00:02:27 · Lukas Saari
[00:02:27] S1: Yeah. I mean, so we're proud to now be serving more than 10,000 care organizations. So having quite the footprint now, The UK is one of our biggest markets also. And our focus is really on the enterprise segment. So how can we be the AI partner of choice of the biggest health care providers across Europe and seeing that it's the bigger enterprises where we can have, like, a CIO counterparty, we can have regular workshops, and we can grow with them from being this, like, scribed medical assistance to operating system and bring them along on this journey. And I think here is something that's super interesting in terms of the value that we bring. I like to talk about, like, the quadruple helix of value that we're bringing. So when you talk about improvements in health care, you're talking about improving quality of care, quantity of care, work environment for clinicians, and patient experiences. Historically, there's pretty much always been a trade off of this. So it would be that, okay, you need to start documenting this new thing because that improves the quality of care because you can follow-up on it more. But that adds to the documentation burden and so on. But now with technology, you can actually improve across all four of these access in parallel. And this just makes it so transformational, both for the clinicians, but also for the decision makers. And then that's sort of spurring this type of technology being adopted now at a precedented scale and pays for health care.
00:03:53 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:03:53] S0: Can you touch on the adoption? Like, how receptive are clinicians, you know, the the real end users to to to using tools like yours?
00:04:03 · Lukas Saari
[00:04:03] S1: Yeah. I mean, so clinicians are historically not the most change prone profession, you could say. I mean, this also comes from them really having felt that they've been abused by IT systems historically. I mean, so if you're familiar with it, you know how clinicians are spending 40% of their time on admin. They're sitting in the systems that were built in the eighties and nineties and still look the parts. And commonly it's been coming like top down from the decision making and saying like, now you need to start using this tool also because then we can have less medical secretaries and we can save some money and so on. But really, it's just like adding to the burden another system, another thing to kick through and so on. But what's so revolutionary now is, okay, if you ask a clinician, what is it that you hate most about your work? It is, I'm right now sitting two hours every evening after I come home and doing documentation instead of spending time with my family. So if you go to a clinician and you say, now we have a solution that solves this for you, the clinicians are very happy to accept it and then start using it. So for us, we're actually commonly seeing that it's rather almost more of like a bottom up motion with the end users, the clinicians being the one that really are pushing for the solution. And then it's rather a question of how fast can you get it through the organization with the procurement, the legal, the compliance aspects, and so on.