Legora and Tandem Health CEOs Reject Anthropic and OpenAI Threat
•February 16, 2026
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Why It Matters
The comments highlight the strategic advantage of industry‑specific AI that can out‑perform generic large‑model tools, influencing investment, partnership and regulatory decisions in legal and health tech.
Key Takeaways
- •Legora claims 400+ firms use its legal AI infrastructure.
- •Tandem Health processes data in Europe, ensuring sovereignty.
- •Anthropic's Claude plug‑in sparked interest but not competition.
- •Both CEOs view frontier labs as idea generators.
Pulse Analysis
Vertical specialization is emerging as a decisive factor in AI adoption. While large‑model providers excel at broad language tasks, they often stumble on nuanced legal drafting or clinical documentation that demand domain‑specific knowledge graphs, regulatory compliance, and workflow integration. Legora’s infrastructure, which ingests hundreds of millions of legal documents to build knowledge graphs, and Tandem Health’s AI co‑pilot, tightly woven into European health‑system workflows, illustrate how deep domain embedding creates value that generic chatbots cannot easily replicate.
The recent rollout of Anthropic’s Claude legal plug‑in and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health feature has stirred market attention but also underscored the limits of one‑size‑fits‑all solutions. Frontier labs aim to monetize through premium APIs, yet their offerings serve more as proof‑of‑concepts that validate demand rather than direct substitutes for specialized platforms. This dynamic has prompted investors to double down on niche players, evident in Legora’s $1.8 billion valuation and its ambition to reach $6 billion, as well as Tandem Health’s $50 million Series A round targeting the UK NHS and broader European health providers.
Looking ahead, data sovereignty and regulatory compliance will shape the competitive landscape. Tandem Health’s commitment to processing data within Europe aligns with GDPR expectations, offering a compelling differentiator for health institutions wary of cross‑border data flows. Meanwhile, Legora’s focus on building a proprietary legal knowledge base positions it to capture high‑margin contracts that generic AI cannot service. Both firms are likely to seek additional capital to accelerate product depth and geographic expansion, reinforcing the view that vertical AI champions will dominate sectors where precision, security, and integration are non‑negotiable.
Legora and Tandem Health CEOs reject Anthropic and OpenAI threat
The CEOs of two prominent Swedish AI startups have rejected suggestions that well-funded US frontier AI labs are threats to their business models.
Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of AI legaltech startup Legora, and Lukas Saari, CEO and co-founder AI healthtech startup Tandem Health, said the rise in popularity of chatbots such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini galvanised interest in their startups, but they were not a threat.
Their views follow Claude chatbot maker Anthropic recently launching a legal plug-in to Claude, which specialises in legal tasks to "review documents, flag risks and track compliance". The tool aims to save firms time and money in legal costs.
The plug-in launch, which is expected to be followed by similar type launches by OpenAI and Google, sent the share price of several large legal data firms tumbling.
Meanwhile, in January this year, ChatGPT maker OpenAI launched a new ChatGPT feature in the US, ChatGPT Health, which can analyse people’s medical records.
Some experts believe that OpenAI and Anthropic, which are looking to drive up paying customers to help fund their billions of dollars needed to power their growth plans, could cannibalise sales of startups built on their tech with rival offerings.
Junestrand wrote a post on LinkedIn about the Claude plug-in launch, outlining its differences to Legora, which is built on top of LLMs.
Explaining more at the Techarena conference in Sweden, Junestrand said: “One of the frustrations that we’ve had is that the models have been really good at say coding, but they haven’t actually been that good on complex legal tasks.
“To give you an example, 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 called Claude a “pocket lawyer”, which was used by individuals for one-off tasks, whereas Legora was a broad infrastructure used by over 400 legal firms.
He said: “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.”
Asked if he was worried about AI frontier labs launching a direct rival product, he said: “We don’t feel very threatened by the model providers. But I do think they serve as a very good spark and idea engine.”
He highlighted the importance of having industry-specific chatbots, using the example of Microsoft Copilot, saying it could have dominated in office use.
But he said that “even if it’s really good, it’s very hard to be good for a finance professional, a tax professional, a legal professional”.
Legora, founded in 2023 and valued at $1.8 billion, is said to be raising funds that would triple its valuation to $6 billion, four months after its last financing round.
Asked whether this is true, Junestrand said: ”There are always a lot of rumours about these things. But that is something I cannot comment on.”
Comparing Legora to Sequoia-backed US rival Harvey, he said: “We started in Stockholm with a €50,000 angel cheque versus competition that had over $20 million from Sequoia and OpenAI.”
He said Legora was winning a high per cent of deals it was competing for.
Meanwhile, Saari said it is “not something that I worry about” when asked about a frontier AI lab launching a rival product to Tandem Health.
Tandem Health, powered by LLMs, offers clinicians an AI co-pilot that generates medical notes during patient consultations.
Saari said: “We are active in a field where you require so deep vertical integration that horizontal generalist solutions will never make the cut.
"And where you need to tailor the workflow so much to the users, you need to integrate with their systems, you need to follow local guidelines and so on.”
He pointed to the launch of ChatGPT Health, which he said now generates 230m users asking health-related questions every week, as an indicator of broader interest in health chatbots.
He said: “This is something that shows the demand for this type of product.
"And we are here offering what is the safe option for doing this, where we are actually protecting like data sovereignty and processing it in Europe. And also anchoring it in the right clinical guidelines.”
Tandem’s co-pilot has evolved from solving the niche use case of medical note taking, expanding to a full medical assistant, which now includes referral notes and patient communications before, during and after patient visits.
In July last year, Tandem raised $50 million in a Series A round after a $10m seed round in 2024.
On future funding, Saari said Tandem would “quite likely” to raise new funds this year.
He said: “Capital is a means to go faster and be more ambitious. I very much optimise for speed. As soon as capital starts being a constraining factor, that is when we will fundraise again."
Tandem, which employs around 130 people, is purely focused on the European market, with the UK, where NHS clinicians use it, its biggest market in terms of user numbers.
He said: "The UK is the most mature market in Europe for these types of solutions.
“In some of the other European countries, when we do our demo to the users, this will be the first time they have ever seen something like this.”
On the agenda for 2026, Saari said he wants to “make sure that all of the large care providers are choosing us as their long-term AI partner. And how we can parallel with this the build out of the product to be a complete AI medical assistant".
Image: Nano Banana Pro
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