Legora and Tandem Health CEOs say ChatGPT and Claude fuel demand for vertical AI tools, not competition, as U.S. labs expand into law and health.
As U.S. AI giants push deeper into legal and healthcare services, two of Sweden’s fastest-growing startups insist they are not looking over their shoulders.
Max Junestrand, co-founder and chief executive of Legora, and Lukas Saari, co-founder and chief executive of Tandem Health, said the surge in popularity of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude has, if anything, amplified interest in their companies.
Their comments follow Anthropic’s recent launch of a legal-focused plug-in for Claude, designed to review documents, flag risks and track compliance — a move that rattled shares of several established legal data providers. In January, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Health in the United States, which can analyze medical records.
Some industry observers argue that frontier AI labs, eager to convert free users into paying customers to finance capital-intensive models, could encroach on startups built atop their technology. Junestrand and Saari disagree.
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“A Pocket Lawyer” vs. Legal Infrastructure
Speaking at the Techarena conference in Sweden, Junestrand said general-purpose models still struggle with complex legal work.
“If you need to draft a share purchase agreement and just throw that into Claude, it is not going to turn out so good,” he said.
He described Claude as a “pocket lawyer” suited for individuals handling one-off tasks. Legora, by contrast, positions itself as institutional infrastructure, serving more than 400 law firms.
“We keep track of hundreds of millions of documents, we store them, we build knowledge graphs between them, we collect and ingest all the world’s legal data,” he said.
Asked whether he feared direct competition from model providers, Junestrand was blunt: “We don’t feel very threatened by the model providers. But I do think they serve as a very good spark and idea engine.”
Founded in 2023, Legora is valued at $1.8 billion and has reportedly attracted investor interest that could significantly lift that figure — though Junestrand declined to comment on fundraising speculation. He contrasted the company’s early €50,000 angel backing with better-funded U.S. rival Harvey, supported by Sequoia and OpenAI, arguing that Legora continues to win a high percentage of competitive deals.
Vertical Depth Over Horizontal Reach
Saari, whose company Tandem Health offers clinicians an AI co-pilot that generates medical notes during consultations, echoed that confidence.
“It is not something that I worry about,” he said when asked about potential competition from frontier labs.
“We are active in a field where you require so deep vertical integration that horizontal generalist solutions will never make the cut,” he added, citing the need to integrate with clinical systems and adhere to local guidelines.
Saari pointed to ChatGPT Health’s reported 230 million weekly health-related queries as proof of demand rather than displacement. “This is something that shows the demand for this type of product,” he said. Tandem, he argued, provides the “safe option,” with European data sovereignty and clinical anchoring at its core.
Since launching as a medical note-taking assistant, Tandem has expanded into referral documentation and patient communications across the care journey. The company raised $50 million in a Series A round last year, following a $10 million seed round, and Saari signaled that additional funding is “quite likely” this year.
“Capital is a means to go faster and be more ambitious,” he said. “As soon as capital starts being a constraining factor, that is when we will fundraise again.”
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A European Strategy
Unlike many AI startups chasing global scale, Tandem remains focused on Europe, with the United Kingdom — where National Health Service clinicians use the tool — its largest market.
“The UK is the most mature market in Europe for these types of solutions,” Saari said. In other countries, he added, product demonstrations are often the first time clinicians have encountered such technology.
Both executives frame their strategy around specialization rather than scale alone: vertical expertise, regulatory fluency and deep workflow integration over generalized AI breadth.
In an era when frontier labs are expanding aggressively into applied domains, these founders are betting that domain depth — not model size — will determine who ultimately owns the customer relationship.
