Tech
Have money, will travel: a16z’s hunt for the next European unicorn
Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. While his visits included stops at companies like Lovable — where he posted from its office — the trips were also about finding future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic.
This all came to light when news emerged that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists’ practices with admin work. While this is a small check for a firm that just announced new funds totaling $15 billion, it confirms that U.S. VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside of the U.S., even without local offices.
Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which previously achieved significant returns from backing Skype, cofounded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have been created in the Swedish capital, and the VC heavyweight tracked down where many of them were coming from.
“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 told TechCrunch.
Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alum of SSE Business Lab — a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. The three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students at both the SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then joined the incubator with additional backing from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They tackled a problem close to home: Li’s mom, a dentist, had told them how admin work detracted from clinical care.
The trio intuited that they could leverage LLMs to help people like her — an idea that they also validated with her and her colleagues. This led them to Dentio’s initial product, a recording tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity product, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they aren’t tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.
Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A round last year to support clinicians with AI across multiple medical specialties. Dentio, by contrast, focuses exclusively on dentists, but it believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect through international expansion
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“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, they share similarities, and Dentio’s assumption is that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio prominently features its “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law.” It signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential to VCs — a callback to Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.
“We went to zero meetups. I reached out to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was heads down building, the word spread out. “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 said.
This wasn’t happenstance: a16z has eyes around the world in order to spot these companies as early as local funds might, Vasquez said. “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.”
For Vasquez, who focuses on AI application investments for a16z, this isn’t just about Sweden, but about “a pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly,” from Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.
Born and raised in El Salvador, he 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 at the time. “I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence on a phone, and ultimately, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”
Corrections: This story originally stated that a16z is an investor in Lovable owing to an editing error. The name of SSE’s incubator has also been corrected.
Tech
ElevenLabs lists BlackRock, Jamie Foxx, and Eva Longoria as new investors
Voice AI company ElevenLabs revealed new investors that are part of its $500 million Series D fundraise, which was first announced in February. The additions include institutions such as BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, and Schroders; enterprises like Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, Santander, KPN, and Deutsche Telekom; and individual investors such as Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk.
The startup also noted that it surpassed $500 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue), after ending last year with nearly $350 million in ARR. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Mati Staniszewski, said last month that ElevenLabs added $100 million in net new ARR in Q1 2026, ending the quarter at roughly $450 million in ARR.
The company has also accelerated its valuation rapidly, growing from $6.6 billion last September to $11 billion this February.
“Voice is the highest-stakes channel for any customer interaction, and the bar for quality, latency, and security is extremely high. ElevenLabs is not just a category leader – it is becoming a foundational enabler of Deutsche Telekom’s broader Industrial AI vision. From voice-as-a-service to multilingual automation and in-network AI agents, we believe the company is uniquely positioned to reshape how businesses interact with customers across all channels,” Karine Peters, managing director at Deutsche Telekom’s venture arm T.Capital, said in a statement.
In the past quarter, the voice AI company has signed enterprise contracts with the likes of Deutsche Telekom, Revolut, and Klarna.
ElevenLabs said that, besides the fundraising, it also closed a $100 million tender, a second in roughly six months after the company issued one last September. Staniszewski said in a blog post that the company will give an opportunity to retail investors to invest in ElevenLabs through Robinhood Ventures, but didn’t provide details about the program.
Staniszewski noted that consumers won’t trust systems that sound robotic or “interact strangely” and emphasized the importance of building “human-level AI voice models.” Last month, the company acquired the team from Polish voice AI startup Papla to bolster its research team.
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Tech
Kaspersky suspects Chinese hackers planted a backdoor into Daemon Tools in ‘widespread’ attack
Security researchers at Kaspersky say they have identified a malicious backdoor planted in the popular and long-running Windows disc imaging software, Daemon Tools.
The Russian cybersecurity company said on Tuesday that data collected from computers around the world running the Kaspersky antivirus software shows a “widespread” attack is under way, targeting thousands of Windows computers running Daemon Tools.
The hackers, whom Kaspersky has linked to a Chinese-language speaking group based on an analysis of the malware, used the backdoor in Daemon Tools to plant additional malware on a dozen computers across the retail, scientific and manufacturing sectors, as well as government systems. Kaspersky said the hacking of these specific computers implied a “targeted” effort.
The company said the targeted organizations are located in Russia, Belarus, and Thailand.
Kaspersky said the backdoor was first detected on April 8.
Kaspersky said it had contacted Disc Soft, the company that maintains Daemon Tools, but did not say if the developer responded or took action. Kaspersky said the supply chain attack is “still active,” suggesting that the hackers can still plant malware on thousands of computers running the disc imaging software.
This is the latest in a string of so-called “supply chain” attacks that have targeted developers of popular software in recent months. Hackers are increasingly taking aim at the accounts of developers who work on widely used code and software, and abusing that access to push malicious code to anyone who relies on the software. This approach lets the hackers break into a large number of computers at once when their malicious code is delivered as a software update.
Earlier this year, hackers associated with the Chinese government hijacked the popular text editing software Notepad++ to deliver malware to a number of organizations with interests in East Asia. Security researchers also warned of another attack last month targeting users who visited the website of CPUID, which makes the popular HWMonitor and CPU-Z tools.
TechCrunch downloaded the Windows installer from Daemon Tools’ website, and the file appeared to contain the backdoor when we checked it with the online malware scanner service VirusTotal.
It’s not known if the macOS version of Daemon Tools was compromised, or if other apps made by Disc Soft are affected.
When contacted for comment, a Disc Soft representative said they are “aware of the report and are currently investigating the situation.”
“Our team is treating this matter with the highest priority and is actively working to assess and address the issue. At this stage, we are not in a position to confirm specific details referenced in the report. However, we are taking all necessary steps to remediate any potential risks and to ensure the security of our users,” the representative said.
Do you know more about the cyberattack targeting Daemon Tools users? Did you receive an antivirus alert saying you were affected? We want to hear from you. To contact this reporter securely, reach out via Signal username zackwhittaker.1337.
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Tech
Etsy launches its app within ChatGPT as it continues its AI push
Etsy announced Tuesday the launch of its native app within ChatGPT, opening up a new way for shoppers to explore its catalog of over 100 million listings.
The new experience is designed to move beyond the limitations of traditional keyword queries. Instead of typing something like “wooden coffee table,” then scrolling and adjusting filters, users can now express what they’re looking for in natural language. For instance, “Help me find a Mother’s Day gift under $100 for my mom who loves gardening.”
Now live in beta, the feature allows users to tag @Etsy directly within a prompt. From there, the Etsy app in ChatGPT surfaces relevant product listings that users can browse, compare, and click through to Etsy for additional details or purchase.
This isn’t Etsy’s first experiment inside ChatGPT. Back in September, Etsy became an early partner in ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout integration, which let users buy products directly inside the chat interface. However, the initiative ended in March, suggesting it didn’t perform as OpenAI had hoped. It was reported that Etsy didn’t see a large volume of sales from the integration, leading Etsy to start building a native app within ChatGPT instead.
Alongside this launch, Etsy also revealed it’s testing a beta conversational search experience within its platform, specifically geared toward helping users find gifts. The gift assistant acts as a personal shopper, offering a guided, conversational way to discover ideas, narrow down preferences, and surface relevant products.
This builds on Etsy’s broader AI push, which includes an AI-powered discovery experience featuring curated collections and a suite of seller tools, including a tool that helps generate product titles and descriptions, as well as a writing assistant to help draft messages to buyers. In 2024, Etsy introduced a new “Designed” label to identify AI content, part of an effort to increase transparency as AI-generated artwork becomes more prevalent on the platform.
The news of a ChatGPT integration comes a week after Etsy reported its Q1 2026 earnings, surpassing revenue expectations with $631 million, and marketplace gross merchandise sales were up 6% year over year. Notably, active buyers increased for the first time in two years to 86.6 million. Etsy also touted 5.6 million active sellers on the platform.
In February, the company announced it was selling Depop to eBay for $1.2 billion in cash, a move aimed at doubling down on its core marketplace.
Etsy joins a growing list of companies building native apps within ChatGPT, including Angi, SeatGeek, Tubi, and Wix. Developers have been able to build apps within the chatbot since October.
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