Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed that he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. While his visits included stops at companies like Lovable — where he wrote from his office — the trips were also about finding future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic.
All of this came to light when news broke that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round to Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists with administrative work. While this is a small check for a firm that just announced $15 billion in new funds in total, it confirms that US VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside the US, even without local offices.
Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which previously achieved significant revenue from backing Skype, co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of high-growth startups have been created in the Swedish capital, and VC heavyweights have tracked down where many of them came from.
“We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and seeing where innovation is emerging. In Sweden, that meant keeping a close eye on ecosystems like (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 a graduate of SSE Business Lab, a startup incubator that has spawned several successful Swedish companies. Three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after rejoining as students at SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then joining the incubator with additional support from the KTH Innovation Launch program. They tackled a problem close to home: Li’s mom, a dentist, told them how admin work was detracting from clinical care.
The trio intuitively realized that they could use the LLM to help people like her – an idea they also confirmed with her and her colleagues. This led them to the original Dentio product, a recording tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity product, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they’re not tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.
Potential competitors include Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A last year to support AI doctors across various medical specialties. Dentio, on the other hand, is focused exclusively on dentists, but believes it can still achieve the scale VCs expect through international expansion
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“We are now a team of seven people and we think it is possible to build a unified way of handling administration across Europe and possibly the world,” said Afrasiabi. While Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio hypothesizes that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio prominently displays its “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that “all relevant 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 callback to Sweden’s history of producing breakthrough companies.
“We went to zero meetings. I approached zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team put their heads down, word spread. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way to the US,” he said.
It wasn’t a coincidence: a16z has eyes around the world to expose these companies to local funds as soon as possible, Vasquez said. “In Sweden, for example, we partnered with leading foreign founders such as Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by making them scouts and mapping out the best local talent.”
For Vasquez, who focuses on investment in AI applications for a16z, it’s not just about Sweden, but about “the pattern of large global companies that are born abroad and scale rapidly,” from Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, the Singaporean AI startup recently acquired by Meta.
Born and raised in El Salvador, he also spends time in São Paulo. “I’m really excited about what’s coming in Brazil and 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 information on their phone, and ultimately Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”
Corrections: This story originally stated that a16z was an investor in Lovable due to an editing error. The name of the SSE incubator has also been fixed.