Nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year sounds like either dedication or madness. For Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, it was strategic stalking of the good kind. He wasn’t just visiting portfolio companies or sipping fancy coffee in Södermalm. He was hunting for the next generation of Swedish startups before they even thought about looking west.
The payoff? A16z just led a $2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish AI startup helping dentists deal with paperwork instead of teeth. It’s pocket change for a firm that recently announced $15 billion in new funds, but that’s not the point. The point is that American VCs are now actively prowling European incubators and university labs like they’re browsing Tinder for the next big thing.
Stockholm isn’t a random choice. A16z made serious money backing Skype, which was co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, the city has pumped out hit after hit. Klarna, Voi, Spotify if you go back far enough. There’s clearly something in the water, or maybe it’s just the long winters forcing people to stay inside and code.
The SSE Labs Pipeline
Vasquez told TechCrunch that a16z has been “closely tracking ecosystems like SSE Labs” at the Stockholm School of Economics. That’s where Dentio came from, along with Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi. It’s basically become a factory for Business ideas that actually scale.
Dentio’s three founders, Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li, and Lukas Sjögren, were high school classmates who reconnected at university. The idea came from Li’s mom, who’s a dentist and apparently spent more time doing admin than actual dentistry. Classic founder origin story, except this time they actually talked to other dentists instead of just building in a vacuum.
They created an AI recording tool that generates clinical notes automatically. The problem? AI scribes are going to be everywhere soon, maybe already are. Once every practice management software includes this feature, why would anyone pay specifically for Dentio? Afrasiabi knows this, which is why they’re already thinking bigger than just note-taking.
Their competition includes Tandem Health, another Swedish startup that raised $50 million last year for AI across multiple medical specialties. Dentio is betting that focusing exclusively on dentists will let them own that vertical completely, then expand across Europe and maybe the world. Bold claim for a seven-person team, but that’s venture capital for you.
Made in Sweden, Backed in America
Dentio slaps “Made in Sweden” branding all over their site and makes a big deal about processing data in Sweden and Finland under EU law. It’s smart positioning for privacy-worried Europeans who still remember Cambridge Analytica. But it’s also signaling to VCs that this is the next wave of Swedish Technology magic.
Here’s the wild part: Afrasiabi claims they went to zero meetups and reached out to zero investors. The money just found them through referrals and word of mouth that somehow traveled across the Atlantic. Sounds too good to be true until you realize a16z has built an entire scouting network specifically to make this happen.
Vasquez explained that they’ve turned successful Swedish founders like Fredrik Hjelm from Voi and Johannes Schildt from Kry into scouts who map local talent. It’s like having informants embedded in every promising startup ecosystem. Not exactly passive investing.
This isn’t unique to Sweden either. Vasquez, who was born in El Salvador, has been spending time in São Paulo looking at Brazilian AI startups. He’s investing in Germany’s Black Forest Labs and recently saw Singapore’s Manus get acquired by Meta. The pattern is clear: great companies are being built everywhere, and American VCs with deep pockets are racing to find them first.
The Great Equalizer Myth
Vasquez wrote on LinkedIn that “AI is the great equalizer” because everyone now has “PhD-level intelligence on a phone.” It’s a nice thought, but it conveniently ignores that most people with PhDs still can’t raise $2.3 million in pre-seed funding. Access to ChatGPT doesn’t erase the massive advantages of going to Stockholm School of Economics or having a16z scouts in your network.
His line about “Silicon Valley is a state of mind” sounds inspiring until you remember that actual Silicon Valley still has most of the money, connections, and market access. Sure, you can build from anywhere, but you’re probably still going to need American VC dollars to scale, which means playing by their rules and giving up significant equity.
Still, the fact that a16z is flying to Stockholm nine times a year instead of waiting for founders to come to them is a real shift. It means the best opportunities aren’t all concentrated in San Francisco anymore, even if the capital still is. European founders have more leverage now, at least the ones smart enough to get into the right incubators and connect with the right scouts.
The question is whether this global hunting strategy actually leads to better returns or just spreads VC attention thinner across more time zones and Zoom calls. When you’re tracking startups in Sweden, Germany, Brazil, and Singapore simultaneously, are you really developing deep market understanding or just collecting passport stamps while local VCs do the actual work of building ecosystems?
