Nine flights from New York to Stockholm in one year. That’s the kind of dedication that makes you wonder what Gabriel Vasquez, an Andreessen Horowitz partner, was really chasing in Sweden. The answer came when a16z revealed they’d led a $2.3 million pre-seed round for Dentio, a Swedish AI startup building admin tools for dental practices.
For a firm that just announced $15 billion in new funds, this is pocket change. But that’s exactly the point. The real story isn’t about the money. It’s about how far American VCs are willing to go to find the next big thing before anyone else does.
Stockholm isn’t some random destination on Vasquez’s travel itinerary. Sweden has history when it comes to producing breakout companies. a16z made serious money backing Skype, which was cofounded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, the Swedish capital has become a breeding ground for fast-growing startups, and a16z decided to figure out exactly where they were all coming from.
The Incubator That Keeps Winning
Turns out there’s a pattern. SSE Business Lab, the startup incubator at Stockholm School of Economics, has been quietly churning out winners. Klarna came from there. So did legal AI startup Legora and e-scooter company Voi. Now Dentio joins that list.
The Dentio founding story has that classic startup origin feel. Three former high school classmates, Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li, and Lukas Sjögren, reconnected as students at Stockholm School of Economics and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Li’s mom is a dentist, and she complained about how admin work was eating into her clinical time. The trio figured they could use LLMs to solve that problem for her and thousands of other dentists dealing with the same headache.
Their first product is an AI recording tool that generates clinical notes automatically. Pretty straightforward, except AI scribes are becoming commoditized fast. Everyone and their cousin is building one. Dentio knows this, which is why Afrasiabi admits they need to prove their value quickly before dentists start shopping around when cheaper alternatives flood the market.
The Competition Is Already Breathing Down Their Neck
Swedish startup Tandem Health raised a $50 million Series A last year to support clinicians across multiple medical specialties with AI. That’s more than twenty times what Dentio just raised. The difference is Dentio is betting everything on dentists specifically, gambling that deep vertical focus will beat horizontal breadth.
Their plan for reaching VC-worthy scale? International expansion. “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. It’s an ambitious claim for a seven-person team, but Europe’s healthcare systems, while fragmented, share enough similarities that what works in Sweden might work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio leans hard into its “Made in Sweden” branding, making sure customers know that all data gets processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law. That’s smart positioning for privacy-conscious European customers who are tired of their data ending up in American cloud servers. But it’s also a signal to VCs that this team understands the regulatory landscape they’re playing in.
The Scout Network That Never Sleeps
Here’s what’s interesting about how a16z found Dentio. “We went to zero meetups. I reached out to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. The team was heads down building, and somehow word still traveled across the Atlantic to Sand Hill Road. That doesn’t happen by accident.
Vasquez explained that a16z has built a network of scouts around the world to spot companies as early as local funds might. In Sweden, they partnered with successful founders like Fredrik Hjelm from Voi and Johannes Schildt from Kry, turning them into talent scouts who map the best local companies before they get big. It’s a business model built on relationships and information arbitrage.
For Vasquez, who focuses on AI application investments, this isn’t just about Sweden. He’s tracking “a pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly.” He pointed to Black Forest Labs in Germany and Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup that Meta recently acquired. Born and raised in El Salvador, Vasquez has also been spending time in São Paulo, excited about what’s brewing in Brazil and across Latin America in AI.
“I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence on a phone, and ultimately, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.” It’s a nice sentiment, though it conveniently ignores the massive capital advantages and network effects that still concentrate in actual Silicon Valley. But the broader point stands: technology talent is distributed globally, even if venture capital still isn’t.
The real question is whether Dentio can move fast enough to build defensibility before the inevitable wave of competitors arrives with deeper pockets and broader ambitions. Nine flights to Stockholm suggests a16z thinks they can.
