Gabriel Vazquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed that he took nine flights from New York to Stockholm in the past year. His visit included stops at companies like Loveable, where he worked from the office, but it was also a journey to find a future Swedish unicorn before crossing the Atlantic.
This became clear when news emerged that a16z led a $2.3 million pre-seed round in Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to assist dental clinics with administrative tasks. While this is just a check for a company that just announced $15 billion in new funding, it confirms that U.S. venture capital firms are actively seeking deal flow outside the U.S. even if they don't have local offices.
Stockholm is a natural destination for a16z, which previously made significant money backing Skype, which was co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, the Swedish capital has spawned quite a few fast-growing startups, and venture capital executives have tracked where many of them have come from.
“We spend a lot of time deeply understanding specific markets and seeing where innovation is occurring. In Sweden, that means closely tracking ecosystems and the companies that emerge from them, like SSE Labs, the startup incubator at Stockholm University of Economics,” Vazquez told TechCrunch.
Along with fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and electric scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alumnus of SSE Labs, a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. After reconnecting as students at both SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), high school classmates Elias Afrasiavi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator with additional support from KTH's Innovation Launch Program. They tackled familiar problems. Lee's mother, a dentist, had told them how her administrative job was interfering with clinical care.
The trio had a hunch that an LLM could help people like her, and they tested this idea with her and her colleagues. This led to Dentio's first product, a documentation tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it's only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity product, Afrasiabi said, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they aren't tempted to switch providers when that happens.
Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health. The company, which raised $50 million in a Series A round last year, leverages AI to support clinicians across multiple medical specialties. In contrast, Dentio focuses solely on dentists, but believes it can still reach the scale expected by VCs through international expansion.
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“We are now a team of seven people and we believe it is possible to create a unified way of handling public administration across Europe and perhaps the world,” Afrasiabi said. Dentio's assumption is that although Europe's health systems are fragmented, there are similarities and that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio features heavily 'Made in Sweden' branding and emphasizes that 'all relevant data will be processed in Sweden and Finland in accordance with Swedish and EU law'. This informs privacy-conscious European customers about data protection. But it also suggests possibilities for venture capital, and reflects on Sweden's history of creating breakthrough companies.
“I didn't attend any meetups. I didn't even contact a single investor,” Afrasiabi said. Word spread while the team worked on construction. “I think the news made its way to the United States primarily through introductions and people talking,” he says.
This was no coincidence. a16z is looking globally to help local funds discover these companies as quickly as possible, Vasquez said. “In Sweden, for example, we partnered with top international founders like Voi founder Fredrik Hjelm and Kry founder Johannes Schildt, turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talent.”
For Vázquez, who is focused on investing in AI applications for the a16z, this is not just a Swedish story, but about “a pattern in which great global companies are born and rapidly expand abroad,” from Germany's Black Forest Labs to Singapore-based AI startup Manas, which was recently acquired by Meta.
I was born and raised in El Salvador and also spend time in São Paulo. “I’m really excited about what AI is happening in Brazil and across Latin America,” 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 phones. Ultimately, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”
Correction: This article originally listed a16z as an investor in Lovable due to an editorial error.