Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed that he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. While his tour included stops at companies like Lovable – where he posted to his office – the trip was about finding the future Swedish unicorns before crossing the Atlantic.
All of this came to light when news broke that a16z led a $2.3 million pre-seed round in Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dental practices with administrative tasks. While this is a small check for a firm that recently announced new funding of up to $15 billion, it confirms that US VCs are looking for deal flow outside the US, even outside of local offices.
Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which previously gained significant profits from supporting Skype, founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have been created in the Swedish capital, and the VC heavyweight has been traced to where many of them came from.
“We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of certain markets and knowing where innovations are coming from. In Sweden, that has meant closely following the ecosystem like SSE Labs – the first incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics – and the companies that come out of it,” Vasquez told TechCrunch.
Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alum of SSE Labs – the first incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. Three former high school students Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students at both SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then joined the incubator with additional support from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They hit a problem close to home: Li’s mother, a dentist, had told them how the admin work interfered with the clinic’s care.
The trio expressed that they could use their LLMs to help people like him – a view that he and his colleagues confirmed. This led them to Dentio’s first product, a recording tool that uses AI to create clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI prescribers become a commodity, and Dentio needs to prove its worth to dentists so they won’t be tempted to switch providers if that happens, Afrasiabi said.
Potential contenders include Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A round last year to support AI-powered doctors across a wide range of medical fields. Dentio, by contrast, is more focused on dentists, but believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect through international expansion.
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“Now we are a group of seven people, and we think it is possible to create a unified approach to management across Europe, and maybe even the whole world,” said Afrasiabi. While Europe’s health care systems are different, they are similar, and Dentio’s assumption is that what works in Sweden can work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio highlights its “Made in Sweden” logo and emphasizes that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law.” It demonstrates data protection for privacy-conscious European customers. But it also shows potential for VCs – a return to Sweden’s history of producing startups.
“We went to zero meetups. I reached out to investors who weren’t there,” said Afrasiabi. As the team headed down, word spread. “I think it was because of referrals and people talking to each other that the news reached the US,” he said.
This was not possible: a16z has eyes around the world to see these companies early in the local currency, says Vasquez. “For example, in Sweden, we partnered with top innovators abroad such as Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talents.”
For Vasquez, who focuses on the investment of AI applications for a16z, this is not only about Sweden, but about “the pattern of the world’s largest companies born abroad and growing rapidly,” from Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, an AI startup made in Singapore that was recently acquired by Meta.
Born and raised in El Salvador, he has been spending time in São Paulo. “I am very excited about what is being done in Brazil and throughout Latin America in AI,” he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence on the phone, and finally, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”
Correction: This story originally said a16z was a Lovable investor due to an editorial error.
