Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed he took nine flights from New York City to Stockholm in a single year. This was not solely to visit Lovable, a portfolio company, but also to seek out future Swedish unicorns before they expand to the United States. This strategy came into focus when news emerged that Andreessen Horowitz led a $2.3 million pre-seed investment into Dentio, a Swedish startup using AI to handle administrative tasks for dental practices.
While this is a relatively small investment for a firm that just announced new funds totaling $15 billion, it confirms that major U.S. venture capital firms are actively pursuing deals outside the country, even without establishing local offices. Stockholm is a natural destination for Andreessen Horowitz, which previously saw significant returns from backing Skype, co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a considerable number of fast-growing startups have emerged from the Swedish capital.
The firm has dedicated effort to understanding where this innovation originates. Gabriel Vasquez explained that they spend considerable time developing a deep understanding of specific markets. In Sweden, this has meant closely tracking ecosystems like SSE Labs, the startup incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics, and the companies it produces. Dentio, like other Swedish successes such as Klarna, Legora, and Voi, is an alum of SSE Labs.
Dentio was founded by three former high school classmates, Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li, and Lukas Sjögren. They reconnected as students at the Stockholm School of Economics and the Royal Institute of Technology before joining the incubator with additional support from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They tackled a problem familiar to them: Anton Li’s mother, a dentist, had described how administrative work detracted from patient care.
The team believed they could use large language models to help professionals like her, an idea they validated with her and her colleagues. This led to Dentio’s initial product, an AI tool that generates clinical notes from recordings. However, the founders acknowledge that AI scribe tools may become commonplace. Afrasiabi stated that Dentio must prove its unique value to dentists to prevent them from switching providers when that happens.
The startup faces potential competition, including from fellow Swedish company Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A last year to build an AI operating system for various clinical workflows. Dentio differentiates itself by focusing exclusively on dentistry but believes it can achieve the scale investors expect through international expansion.
The company now has a team of seven and aims to build a unified system for handling dental administration across Europe and potentially the world. While European healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio assumes a solution that works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the European Union.
Dentio prominently uses “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law. This highlights data protection for privacy-conscious customers and also signals potential to investors, recalling Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.
The founders adopted a focused approach. Afrasiabi noted they did not attend meetups or reach out to investors initially. While the team was building the product, word spread through referrals and conversations, eventually reaching the United States.
This discovery was not accidental. Andreessen Horowitz has established a network to spot promising companies as early as local funds might. In Sweden, Vasquez said the firm partnered with top founders like Fredrik Hjelm of Voi and Johannes Schildt of Kry, turning them into scouts to map the best local talent.
For Vasquez, who focuses on AI investments, this is part of a broader pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly, citing examples from Germany to Singapore. Born and raised in El Salvador, he has also been spending time in São Paulo, expressing excitement about the AI developments brewing in Brazil and across Latin America. He believes AI is a great equalizer, granting widespread access to advanced intelligence, and ultimately, that Silicon Valley is a state of mind.