Live money, travel: a16z’s search for Europe’s next unicorn

Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, revealed recently he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. While his travels have included stops at companies like Lovable – where he has been sent from his office – these trips were also about finding future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic.

All this was known when news came out that a16z led a $2.3 million pre-seed round to Dentiuma Swedish startup that uses AI to support dentist practices and admin work. Although this is a small check for companies that have just announced new investments $15 billionproves that US VCs are willing to venture outside the US, even without local offices.

Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which made huge profits by supporting Skype, founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a large number of fast-growing start-ups have been created in the Swedish capital, and the VC heavyweight has followed where most of them come from.

“We spend a lot of time creating a deep understanding of the real markets and knowing where innovations are emerging. In Sweden, this has meant keeping a close eye on environments such as SSE Labs – the start-up incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics – and the companies that are emerging from it,” Vasquez told TechCrunch.

Like fintech giant Klarna, certified AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alum of SSE Labs – a start-up incubator that has created several successful Swedish companies. Three former high school students Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students of SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then they entered the incubator with the support of KTH. Innovation Launch Program. They tackled a problem close to home: Li’s mother, a dentist, told them how admin work gets in the way of medical care.

The trio decided they could use their LLMs to help people like him – a thought he and his colleagues confirmed. This led them to Dentio’s first product, an imaging tool that uses AI to generate medical records. But it’s only a matter of time before AI assistants become a commodity, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they won’t be tempted to switch providers when it happens, Afrasiabi said.

Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A last year to support physicians with AI in several medical fields. Dentio, by contrast, is focused on dentists, but believes it can still reach the level VCs are hoping for through international expansion.

“Now we are a group of seven people, and we think it is possible to create a unified management system. poor management/planning “In terms of comparison, we have seen that it is the biggest business in Europe and in the world,” Afrasiabi said. Although European healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio’s idea is that what works in Sweden can work elsewhere in the EU.

Dentio lives up to its “Made in Sweden” label and emphasizes that “everything necessary is made in Sweden and Finland in accordance with Swedish and EU regulations.” It demonstrates data protection for privacy-conscious European customers. But it also shows the potential of VCs – a call back to Sweden’s history of creating emerging companies.

“We went to zero meetups. I reached out to investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was on the ground building, word spread. “I think it’s mainly because of messaging and people talking that the news reached the US,” he said.

That didn’t happen: the a16z did eyes all over the world to see these companies as quickly as possible for local investment, Vasquez said. “For example in Sweden, we partnered with top foreign startups like Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by turning them into scouts and capturing the best local talent.”

For Vasquez, who focuses on AI investment at a16z, this is not just about Sweden, but about “the way of the world’s biggest companies that are born abroad and grow fast,” from Sweden. Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, the launch of AI from Singapore recently written by Meta.

Born and raised in El Salvador, he also lived in São Paulo. “I am very happy with what is happening in Brazil and in Latin America in AI,” he he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I believe AI is the great organizer,” he added. “Many people now have advanced PhDs on the phone, and in the end, Silicon Valley is the mind.”

Correction: This article reported that the a16z is a currency in Lovable due to an editing error.