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 posted from its office – the trips were also about finding future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic.
All of this came as news broke that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dental practices with administration work. While this is a small check for a firm that just announced new funding totaling $15 billion, 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 has previously made significant returns by backing Skype, co-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 tracked down where many of them came from.
“We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and knowing where innovation occurs. In Sweden, this has meant closely following ecosystems such as [SSE Business Lab] — the startup 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 Business Lab – a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. The three former high school friends 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), and then joined the incubator with additional support from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They tackled a problem close to home: Li’s mother, a dentist, had told them how administrative work was detracting from clinical care.
The trio believed 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 AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI printers become a commodity product, 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 last year raised a $50 million Series A round to support AI clinicians across multiple medical specialties. Dentio, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on dentists, but it 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 that it is possible to build a unified way of handling administration across Europe and maybe even across the world,” Afrasiabi said. While Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio’s assumption is that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio has a prominent character with its “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in accordance with Swedish and EU legislation.” It signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential for VCs—a callback to Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.
“We went to zero meetings. I reached out to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was building, word spread. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way over to the United States,” he said.
This was not the case: a16z has eyes around the world to spot these companies as early as local funds could, Vasquez said. “In Sweden, for example, we collaborated with top founders abroad such as Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talent.”
For Vasquez, who focuses on AI application investment for a16z, it’s not just about Sweden, but about “a pattern of large global companies that are born abroad and scale quickly,” from Schwarzwald Labs in Germany to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.
He was born and raised in El Salvador and has also spent time in São Paulo. “I’m really excited about what’s brewing in Brazil and in Latin America in AI,” he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I think AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD intelligence on a phone, and ultimately Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”
Corrections: This story originally stated that a16z is an investor in Lovable due to an editing error. The name of SSE’s incubator has also been corrected.