Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed made nine flights from New York to Stockholm in one year. While his visits included stops at companies like Lovable — where he was posted from his office — the trips were also about finding future Swedish unicorns before they crossed the Atlantic.
All this came to light when news emerged which a16z had driven a $2.3 million pre-seed round in Dentioa Swedish startup that uses artificial intelligence to help dentist offices with admin work. While that’s a small check for a company that just announced new funds totaling $15 billion, it confirms that US VCs are actively looking for deal flow outside the US, even without local offices.
Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which has previously made significant returns from backing Skype, which was co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have been established in the Swedish capital, and VC heavyweights have identified where many of them came from.
“We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and knowing where innovation is emerging. In Sweden, this meant that we closely monitor ecosystems such as [SSE Business Lab] — the Stockholm School of Economics startup incubator — 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 the SSE Business Lab — a startup incubator that has spawned many successful Swedish companies. The three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reuniting 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: Lee’s mom, a dentist, had told them how the administrator’s work cut into clinical care.
The trio sensed that they could leverage LLMs to help people like her—an idea they also validated with her and her colleagues. This led them to Dentio’s initial product, a recording tool that uses artificial intelligence to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they won’t be tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.
Potential competitors include Swedish startup Tandem Health, which created a $50 million Series A over the past year to support clinicians with artificial intelligence in many medical specialties. Dentio, by contrast, focuses exclusively on dentists, but believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect through international expansion
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“Now we are a team of seven people and we believe it is possible to build a single way of managing administration across Europe, and maybe even around the world,” Afrasiabi said. While Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio’s hypothesis is that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio prominently displays its “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that “all related data is processed in Sweden and Finland in accordance with Swedish and EU law.” It signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential for VCs – a return to Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.
“We went to zero meetings. I pitched to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the group headed down, word spread. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got to the US,” he said.
That was no accident: a16z has eyes around the world to identify these companies as early as local funds could, Vasquez said. “In Sweden, for example, we worked with top overseas founders like Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talent.”
For Vasquez, who focuses on investing in AI applications for a16z, this is not just about Sweden, but about “a pattern of large global companies that are born abroad and scale quickly,” from Germany’s Black Forest Labs to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.
Born and raised in El Salvador, he has also spent time in Sao Paulo. “I’m really excited about what’s brewing in Brazil and across Latin America in AI,” he said he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I think artificial intelligence is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence from a phone, and ultimately Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”
Corrections: This story originally reported a16z as an investor in Lovable due to an editing error. The name of the SSE incubator has also been fixed.
