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Tao Systems

About Tao Systems

Built after a decade inside hospital trusts and broker networks

Tao Systems started in London in 2017. The work before it was patient-record integrations for NHS hospital trusts and CRM tooling for insurance broker networks. Relay and Basin came out of that work: a CRM that a network can put its own name on, and a data platform that runs where the data already lives.

The pattern in both jobs was the same. The customer had data it wasn't allowed to move, a vendor that wanted it in their cloud, and a compliance team caught in between. Relay and Basin were built so that the answer to 'where does the data go' can be 'nowhere'. Both products run only in the customer's own cloud account or datacentre, and that is still the only way they ship.

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Founded
2017
London
Based in
London
United Kingdom
Products
Relay and Basin
White-label CRM and on-premises data lake
Independent assurance
CREST pen test, SOC 2 Type II
Annual penetration test by a CREST-accredited firm and SOC 2 Type II audit by an AICPA-accredited firm
Runs in
Your cloud or datacentre
Your own AWS, Azure or GCP account, or your own datacentre. Never ours.

Customers

Who we work with

Regulated organisations that can't send their data to whichever vendor has the nicest dashboard. Customers rarely allow logo use, so the examples below are anonymised.

  • Healthcare providers and health-tech

    Hospital groups and pharmacy networks run Basin next to Epic and Cerner over HL7 v2 and FHIR, with PHI classified automatically and every read logged. A US specialty pharmacy network connected 14 source systems and took monthly compliance reporting from three weeks to same-day.

  • Insurers and broker networks

    Broker networks offer Relay to their members under their own brand. One UK network runs it, branded as its own product, for 1,200 member agencies and around 9,000 users.

  • Banks and financial services

    Regulatory reporting from data that isn't allowed to leave the building. A regional bank runs Basin air-gapped, with quarterly upgrade bundles applied offline.

  • Public sector

    Bodies that need UK data residency, a DPA with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, and an audit log their internal auditors can export to their own SIEM.

  • Professional membership organisations

    A membership body with 180,000 members uses Relay as its member CRM, single sign-on against its existing identity provider, with a branded member portal and mobile app.

  • Franchise networks

    Franchisors give every franchisee a CRM under the network's brand: one platform, per-tenant branding, and iOS and Android apps published under the franchisor's name and icon.

How we build

Opinions we've built into the products

These decide what gets built and what gets turned down. Each one has cost us a deal at some point, and each one is why the customers we do have stay.

  1. 01

    Customers should be able to leave.

    Basin stores everything as Parquet and Apache Iceberg on S3-compatible object storage. Stop paying us and your data is still readable by any tool that speaks SQL. Relay exports everything through its APIs. Lock-in is a sales strategy, not an architecture.

  2. 02

    On-premises means on-premises.

    Basin has no telemetry, no phone-home and licence keys that work offline. Air-gapped sites get quarterly upgrade bundles they apply offline. There are no sub-processors, because nothing leaves your network.

  3. 03

    Audit logs record reads as well as writes.

    Relay writes every read and every write to an immutable log. Basin logs every query with the user, the tables and columns touched and the row count returned. HIPAA investigations turn on who looked, so read logging is the default, not a paid tier.

  4. 04

    You deal with engineers, not account managers.

    Support requests and security questionnaires are answered by the engineers who build Relay and Basin, by email and screen-share. There's no first-line queue and nobody between you and the answer who has to go and ask.

Talk to an engineer

Say where the data has to live and what the software needs to do. We reply within one working day with a straight answer on fit, install time and cost.

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