Tandem Health Launches Sovereign Health, Software Dependencies, The Open-Source Playbook

Tandem Health CEO Lukas Saari posted on LinkedIn:

Healthcare is critical infrastructure, and patient data is among the most sensitive data a society holds.

Yet most clinical AI runs in data centres owned by the global hyperscalers. Because there hasn't been a viable alternative.

Since founding Tandem Health, we have always strived to go above and beyond when it comes to data protection and clinical safety.

I am thus very excited to now be launching our Sovereign Health offering. This has two main components:

1. Storage & hosting: Partnering with the European cloud provider Scaleway. As we see that European-owned clouds now have reached the maturity needed to power our solutions.

2. Processing: Enabling using open-weight AI models instead of closed source models. As we now have proven that with our Tandem harness, open-weight models can be used without compromising on clinical safety.

As a European, I feel very proud that a fully sovereign tech stack now is possible.

Built in Europe, for Europe, backed by European capital, and now able to run on fully European infrastructure.

Scaleway is a French cloud provider that utilises open-source software on top of a mixture of open-source and proprietary hardware infrastructure. For AI workloads that hardware is primarily NVIDIA chips, although they also have other offerings. NVIDIA is obviously not an EU company, but what Lukas Saari means with “fully run on European infrastructure” is that there is minimal software dependency and the whole entity is operated in Europe, even if using US hardware.

The software dependency part is the argument that Scaleway brings against hyperscaler-driven sovereign cloud initiatives such as Delos Cloud. By the nature of being tied to Azure, Delos Cloud depends on Microsofts for software updates and new feature releases, even if the whole cloud is run disconnected from any legal US entity. Scaleway doesn’t have this single-company dependency, even as they face in many aspects the opposite drawbacks, such as having code maintenance uncertainty and general cyber vulnerability, both of which greatly depend on community efforts. Everything has its pros and cons.

Last week I wrote how open-sourcing their models was a strategic move from Doctolib, one that will equally benefit NVIDIA, and the Tandem Health x Scaleway partnership follows the same playbook. Whether you develop your own open-source models or just promote the use of such, the effect is the same - the value moves away from the middle model layer and towards two opposite directions: back to the infrastructure layer (Scaleway); as well as up to the product experience layer (Tandem Health), where the human interactions take place.

This last point is the same that Heidi Health CEO Thomas Kelly indicates as well: product experience matters big time. What’s more, it is the product interface that accommodates the human interaction and as AI slowly but surely aggregates the apps, that touchpoint has never been more valuable. On one hand it builds trust, which leads to preference; and on the other it captures unique data, which is a moat you can’t defeat.