Alumni, AI & Healthcare: young graduates met at kaiko.ai Amsterdam

The University of Twente has four impact domains that define where it wants to make a difference: Chip Technology, Climate, Health, and Safety & Security.

The Young Alumni Network (YAN) — the UT's community for recent graduates — takes those same priorities seriously. On 11 June, it put Health front and centre with a meetup at the Amsterdam office of kaiko.ai, a Dutch company with UT-DNA building agentic AI for hospitals.

The idea came from one alumnus who wanted to stay close to the community. Daan Geijs, alumnus Biomedical Engineering and Science Education, coached at the UT's Career Café in 2025 — a one-afternoon event connecting students with alumni for career guidance. The conversations stuck with him. Daan now works as Product Discovery Lead at kaiko.ai, also collaborating with Romion Health as a Lead Developer, and he wanted to open kaiko.ai's doors to fellow UT alumni. The Alumni Office connected him with the YAN board, and from there the meetup took shape.

29 alumni registered, a genuinely mixed group. People from Technical Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, Industrial Design Engineering, Public Administration, and Business Information Technology, now working across hospitals, MedTech companies, AI and data, research, and consultancy. Few rooms put a hospital clinician, an AI engineer, a consultant, and a PhD researcher at the same table and ask them to talk about the same problem — this one did.

Daan opened with a short introduction to kaiko.ai's current focus: preparing information for doctors, the step where they currently see the biggest opportunity for impact. He pointed to the company's Zurich office as the R&D engine behind it — building their own models, because the models available today aren't yet good enough to solve real medical problems, and developing the agentic framework and orchestrator that ties it all together.

He introduced the other UT alumni from kaiko.ai in the room: Joost, on the engineering side; Daan, working on data evaluation; Kevin, focused on imaging and the diagnostic side of healthcare; and Floortje, who recently joined the product team.

One change to the evening: Kicky van Leeuwen, co-founder of Romion Health, was unable to attend. Her place was filled by her co-founder and fellow UT alumnus, Stephan Romeijn, who shared the story behind Romion Health — a team of ten now, two and a half years after he and Kicky started it. Their work spans three areas: helping healthcare organisations adopt AI responsibly, building AI literacy so hospitals can use these tools safely, and — together with Daan — running Health AI Register, an overview of commercially available AI algorithms, what they do, and the scientific evidence behind them. What started in radiology is now expanding into pathology, cardiology, and radiotherapy.

To get the room talking, Daan posed a series of propositions — hands up if you agree, nothing if you don't. Among them: "It's unethical if doctors are still not using AI in 10 years." And: "We're making too much fuss about AI validation — it's getting too complicated." The statements kept coming, and so did the disagreements — exactly the kind of conversation starter an evening like this is for.

A strong turnout, and people who stayed

By the end of the evening, the room had done exactly what it set out to do. As Daan put it afterwards: a great event, with a strong turnout — people stuck around until late.

As YAN board member Koen Hasperhoven wrote: "At the Young Alumni Network, we don't just talk about the University of Twente impact domains — we bring them to life." Not as a formal session, but as a space to connect people working on similar challenges and learn from each other.

Thanks to hosts Daan Geijs, Stephan Romeijn, and Kicky van Leeuwen, and to kaiko.ai for opening their office for the evening.

Want to know more about Daan's journey from research to kaiko.ai? Read his story on daangeijs.nl or in U-Today: "Als een dolle stier de zorg efficiënter maken".

About YAN (Young Alumni Network)

YAN exists to keep young alumni connected to each other and to the university after graduation — not through formal reunions, but through informal evenings built around shared professional ground. Healthcare is one of those grounds: it's full of opportunity, but notoriously hard to change. Getting an AI tool from "it works" to "a hospital actually uses it" is a challenge that touches clinicians, researchers, AI builders, and consultants alike — which made it a natural fit for an impact-domain-led meetup.