Benedikt von Thüngen, Founder and CEO, Sanome, shares the origin story of his business, its biggest challenge to date and what pharma needs to know about AI
Interview by Isabel O’Brien
Tell us the story about how and why you founded Sanome
I started Sanome after losing my father because clinical teams detected his deterioration too late. That experience changed how I saw healthcare. We have world-class clinicians and an increasingly digitised healthcare system, but critical patient information is scattered across systems, buried in unstructured data, or presented too late to act. This inefficiency has real human and financial consequences: 1 in 5 deteriorations are detected too late, driving avoidable ICU admissions, poor patient outcomes and longer lengths of stay. For hospitals, these inefficiencies equate to tens of millions in annual losses from blocked beds and delayed discharges. Sanome was born to bridge the gap between data and decisions in healthcare – turning raw patient data into actionable, real-time insight to drive better, faster clinical decisions.
What’s a typical day like in your role as CEO?
The role of a startup CEO changes depending on the stage of the company. In the early stages, it’s all-consuming – context-switching every 30 minutes between product, commercial, regulatory, finance, technology… (the list goes on). At Sanome, we’re still in that early scaling phase, so every decision feels close to the front line. The challenge is learning to step back – to work on the business, not in it. My focus today is on building the right strategy and structure, hiring exceptional people, setting clear KPIs and ensuring we hit the milestones that take us from a great product with early traction to a truly scalable business that delivers measurable impact for patients and health systems.
There’s a lot of hype suggesting AI will transform drug discovery or redesign pharma overnight
What’s a challenge you’re navigating as a business right now?
Building a scalable value proposition in the NHS – or any healthcare system – is incredibly hard. Resources are stretched, operational pressures are constant and adoption cycles are long. Even when the clinical need is obvious, hospitals face competing priorities, fragmented budgets and limited capacity to implement change. Innovation in this environment isn’t just about technology; it’s about timing, evidence and trust. You have to demonstrate value across clinical, operational and financial dimensions, often before those benefits can be fully measured. Our job is to show that better, earlier decisions don’t just improve outcomes for patients but also ease the pressure on the system. This will help is build momentum for long term adoption.
What’s something you wish more people in pharma understood about AI?
That AI isn’t a magic wand – it’s a toolbox of different algorithms, each useful for specific problems. There’s a lot of hype suggesting AI will transform drug discovery or redesign pharma overnight, but the reality is more nuanced. AI will make a big difference to a few key parts of the process, but it won’t move every cog in the machine. The real game-changer will come from access to high-quality, real-world, real-time data – the kind that captures what is actually happening to patients across care settings. That’s where innovation becomes meaningful.
What three words would your closest friend use to describe you? And why?
Resilient – probably because I’ve had my fair share of knocks, and I tend to get back up and keep going. Losing my father gave me a sense of purpose that still drives everything I do.
Relentless – once I set my mind to something, I’ll find a way through. My team might call it determination; my friends might call it stubbornness – both are probably true.
Kind – I genuinely care about the people around me. Building something meaningful isn’t just about the mission; it’s about the people you do it with. If you lose that along the way, the rest doesn’t really matter.
Guest bio
Benedikt von Thüngen is the Founder and CEO of Sanome, a London-based health-tech company using AI to build a “Human Digital Twin” that helps clinicians detect patient deterioration earlier. With a background in biosciences and a career spent building and scaling companies across AI, enterprise software and healthcare, including the speech recognition leader Speechmatics, he is driven by a mission to make healthcare proactive, predictive and personalised. A guest lecturer at Cambridge and mentor with the Royal Academy of Engineering, Benedikt is known for his pragmatic, high-energy leadership and relentless focus on turning data into life-saving insight.
