Have money, will travel: a16z’s hunt for the next European unicorn | TechCrunch

Gabriel Vasquez, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed that he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. While his visits also include stops at companies like Lovable – where he posted from his office – the trips were also about finding future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic Ocean.

This all came to light then news emerged that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round inside Dentiuma Swedish startup that uses AI to help dental practices with administrative work. While this is a small check for a company 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 previously achieved significant returns with its backing of Skype, co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have emerged 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 is emerging. In Sweden, that meant closely monitoring ecosystems like SSE Labs – the Stockholm School of Economics’ startup incubator – and the companies that emerge from them,” Vasquez told TechCrunch.

Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alumnus of SSE Labs – a startup incubator that has spawned several successful Swedish companies. The three former high school classmates 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 subsequently 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 detracted from clinical care.

The trio had an intuition that they could use LLMs to help people like them – an idea they confirmed with her and her colleagues. This led them to Dentio’s first product, a recording tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI writers become a commodity, and Dentio needs to prove their value to dentists so they aren’t tempted to switch suppliers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.

Potential competitors include Swedish startup Tandem Health, which a $50 million Series A last year’s round to support doctors with AI in multiple medical specialties. Dentio, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on dentists, but believes it can still achieve the scale that venture capital firms expect through international expansion.

“Now we are a team of seven people, and we think it is possible to build a uniform way of management across Europe, and maybe even around the world,” Afrasiabi said. Although Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio’s assumption is that what works in Sweden could also work elsewhere in the EU.

Dentio clearly displays the ‘Made in Sweden’ brand 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 venture capital funds – a nod to Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.

“We went to zero meetups. I contacted zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was building, word spread. “I think it was mainly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way to the US,” he said.

This was no coincidence: a16z has eyes around the world to spot these companies as early as local funds can, Vasquez said. “For example, in Sweden we worked with top founders abroad, such as Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by turning them into scouts and identifying 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 being born abroad and scaling rapidly,” from Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.

Born and raised in El Salvador, he also spent time in São Paulo. “I’m very excited about what’s happening in Brazil and across Latin America in AI,” he says wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence through a phone, and ultimately Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”

Correction: This story originally stated that a16z is an investor in Lovable due to an editing error.