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

Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently said he took nine flights from New York City to Stockholm in a single year. While some of those trips included visits to companies like Lovable — where he even posted from its office — a broader mission also drove the travel: finding the next wave of Swedish unicorns before they make the jump across the Atlantic.

The detail surfaced as news spread that a16z led a $2.3 million pre-seed round in Dentio, a Swedish startup using AI to help dental practices manage administrative work. The check is small for a venture firm that has just announced $15 billion in new funds, but it underscores how U.S. VCs are actively hunting for deal flow outside the U.S., even without local offices.

Stockholm is an obvious stop for a16z. The firm previously scored major returns backing Skype, co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, Stockholm has produced a steady pipeline of fast-growing startups, and the venture giant has been tracking the origins of that momentum.

“We 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 Business Lab] — the startup incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics — and the companies coming out of it,” Vasquez said.

Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio came out of SSE Business Lab, the Stockholm School of Economics’ startup incubator that has produced multiple successful Swedish companies. Dentio was founded by three former high school classmates — Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li, and Lukas Sjögren — who reconnected as students at SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology). After that, they joined the incubator, also receiving support through KTH’s Innovation Launch program.

Their initial problem was personal: Li’s mother, a dentist, had told them that admin duties were eating into time meant for clinical care.

The founders believed LLMs could help reduce that burden — and they validated that belief directly with Li’s mother and her colleagues. That process led to Dentio’s first product: an AI-powered recording tool that generates clinical notes. But Afrasiabi said AI scribe tools are likely to become a commodity, and Dentio will need to prove it delivers enough value that dentists won’t be tempted to switch providers when that happens.

Potential rivals include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A round last year to support clinicians with AI across multiple medical specialities. Dentio, by contrast, is focused entirely on dentists, but believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect by expanding internationally.

“Now we’re a team of seven people, and we think that it’s possible to build a unified way of handling administration all over Europe, and maybe even all over the world,” Afrasiabi said. While Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, Dentio argues that they share enough similarities for what works in Sweden to translate to other EU markets.

Dentio leans into its “Made in Sweden” identity and highlights that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law.” The company positions this as a signal of data protection for privacy-conscious European customers. It also serves as a signal to investors — a nod to Sweden’s track record of producing breakout global companies.

“We went to zero meetups. I reached out to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team stayed heads-down building, the story still spread. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way over to the U.S.,” he added.

Vasquez said that it isn’t accidental. a16z is actively building global visibility early, aiming to spot promising startups as quickly as local funds. “In 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,” he said.

For Vasquez — who focuses on AI application investments at a16z — the Sweden push is part of a broader theme: “a pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly,” from Germany’s Black Forest Labs to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.

Born and raised in El Salvador, Vasquez has also been spending time in São Paulo. “I’m really excited about what’s brewing in Brazil and across Latin America in AI,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “I believe AI is the greatest equaliser,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence on a phone, and ultimately, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”