Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed that he flew from NYC to Stockholm nine times in a year. His visit included visits to companies like Lovable (posted from his office), but the trip was also about finding future Swedish unicorns before crossing the Atlantic.
All of this came to light as news broke that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round in Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists with their administrative tasks. It’s a small check for a company that just announced new funding totaling $15 billion, but it confirms that U.S. VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside the U.S. without a local office.
Stockholm was a natural destination for a16z, which had previously achieved significant revenue through its support of Skype, which was co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a slew of fast-growing startups have sprung up in the Swedish capital, and VC heavyweights have tracked where many of them came from.
“We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and identifying where innovation emerges. In Sweden, this means closely tracking ecosystems and the companies that emerge from them, such as (SSE Business Lab), a startup incubator at the Stockholm School of Economics,” Vasquez told TechCrunch.
Like fintech giant Klarna, legitimate AI startup Legora, and electric scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alumnus of SSE Business Lab, a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. Three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), with additional support from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They tackled issues close to home. Li’s mother, a dentist, talked about how administrative duties interfere with clinical care.
The trio knew they could use their LLM to help people like her, and she and her colleagues validated the idea. This led to the initial product Dentio, a transcription tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI scribes become commercial products, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they aren’t tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.
Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A round last year to support clinicians using AI in a variety of medical specialties. Dentio, by contrast, is focused solely 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 I think it is possible to build a unified way of handling administration across Europe, and maybe even around the world,” Afrasiabi said. Although Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio assumes that what works in Sweden may work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio prominently displays its “Made in Swedish” branding and emphasizes that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in accordance with Swedish and EU law.” This signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential to VCs. This is a callback to Sweden’s history of producing breakthrough companies.
“We had no meetups at all. We had no investors at all,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was building, word spread. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking that the news got to the United States,” he said.
This was no coincidence. a16z is watching globally to help local funds identify these companies as quickly as possible, Vasquez said. “For example, in Sweden, we partnered with top international founders, such as Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, to scout them and map top local talent.”
For Vasquez, who focuses on investing in AI applications for a16z, this isn’t just a Swedish issue, it’s about “a pattern of great global companies being born overseas and scaling rapidly,” from Germany’s Black Forest Labs to Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.
Born and raised in El Salvador, he also spends time in Sao Paulo. “I’m really excited to see what’s happening in AI in Brazil and across Latin America,” he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Now most people have access to PhD-level information on their phones, and ultimately Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”
Correction: This article originally stated that a16z was an investor in Loveable due to an editing error. The SSE incubator name has also been revised.
