Spott, which builds an artificial intelligence-powered applicant tracking system and customer relationship management suite tailored for recruitment agencies, has closed a $21 million Series A round. Balderton Capital led the investment, joined by Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino.
The Leuven startup was founded in 2024 by three university friends—Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys—who previously worked with recruitment firms while employed at McKinsey, Bain and BCG. Their experience revealed an industry struggling to modernize, burdened by outdated and disconnected technology stacks.
Recruitment firms typically juggle multiple disconnected tools: one for tracking applicants and managing relationships with clients, plus separate software for finding talent, reaching out to candidates, recording notes and coordinating schedules. This fragmentation forces recruiters to spend significant time copying information from one system to another.
Spott consolidates these capabilities into a single AI-native environment. The platform integrates candidate management, search functionality, messaging, outreach capabilities and workflow automation. It processes data from emails, resumes and recruitment workflows to create searchable records, including access to databases holding up to two million candidates.
The company's approach emphasizes automating routine administrative and sourcing tasks while preserving human decision-making for critical moments. Spott will not automatically advance candidates through pipelines or present them to clients without explicit human authorization.
During our work with recruitment businesses, we saw firms under intense pressure to cut costs and make more placements, while their recruiters lost hours moving information between outdated systems. Recruitment succeeds through trust and human judgement. Spott gives agencies control of their data and puts AI to work around their recruiters, freeing them to deepen relationships with candidates and clients,
Lander Degreve, co-founder and CEO of Spott
The capital will fuel growth across three fronts: geographic expansion into new markets, development of capabilities for larger enterprise customers, and advancement of its agentic AI features. Spott is establishing offices in Sydney and New York while expanding its team and engineering resources. The company also plans to introduce AI-driven tools for spotting job openings, tracking candidate career progression and recommending recruitment strategies.
Source: Tech.eu
