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paper plane made from a ten dollar bill | Image Credits:Getty Images <\/p>\n paper plane made from a ten dollar bill | Image Credits:Getty Images <\/p>\n
Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed he took nine flights<\/a> from NYC to Stockholm in one year. That wasn\u2019t just to visit Lovable<\/a>, a portfolio company, but also to look for other future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic.<\/p>\n This all came to light when news emerged<\/a> that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round<\/a> into Dentio<\/a>, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists\u2019 practices with admin work. While this is a small check for a firm that just announced new funds totaling $15 billion<\/a>, it confirms that U.S. VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside of the U.S., even without local offices.<\/p>\n Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which previously achieved significant returns from backing Skype, cofounded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennstr\u00f6m. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have been created in the Swedish capital, and the VC heavyweight tracked down where many of them were coming from.<\/p>\n \u201cWe spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and knowing where innovation is emerging. In Sweden, that has meant closely tracking ecosystems like SSE Labs \u2014 the startup incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics \u2014 and the companies coming out of it,\u201d Vasquez told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alum of SSE Labs \u2014 a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. The three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sj\u00f6gren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students at both the SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then joined the incubator with additional backing from KTH\u2019s Innovation Launch program<\/a>. They tackled a problem close to home: Li\u2019s mom, a dentist, had told them how admin work detracted from clinical care.<\/p>\n The trio intuited that they could leverage LLMs to help people like her \u2014 an idea that they also validated with her and her colleagues. This led them to Dentio\u2019s initial product, a recording tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it\u2019s only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity product, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they aren\u2019t tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.<\/p>\n Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A<\/a> round last year to support clinicians with AI across multiple medical specialties. Dentio, by contrast, focuses exclusively on dentists, but it believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect through international expansion<\/p>\n \u201cNow we\u2019re a team of seven people, and we think that it\u2019s possible to build a unified way of handling administration all over Europe, and maybe even all over the world,\u201d Afrasiabi said. While Europe\u2019s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio\u2019s assumption is that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.<\/p>\n Dentio prominently features its \u201cMade in Sweden\u201d branding and emphasizes that \u201call relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law.\u201d It signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential to VCs \u2014 a callback to Sweden\u2019s history of producing breakout companies.<\/p>\n \u201cWe went to zero meetups. I reached out to zero investors,\u201d Afrasiabi said. While the team was heads down building, the word spread out. \u201cI think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way over to the U.S.,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n This wasn\u2019t happenstance: a16z has eyes around the world<\/a> in order to spot these companies as early as local funds might, Vasquez said. \u201cIn Sweden for example, we partnered with top founders abroad like Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talent.\u201d<\/p>\n For Vasquez, who focuses on AI application investments for a16z, this isn\u2019t just about Sweden, but about \u201ca pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly,\u201d from Black Forest Labs<\/a> in Germany to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta<\/a>.<\/p>\n