Spott secures $21M Series A to expand its AI platform for recruitment agencies

Spott, an AI-native applicant tracking system (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) platform for recruitment agencies, has raised $21 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino.

Founded in Leuven in 2024 by university friends Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys, Spott emerged from the founders’ work with recruitment businesses at McKinsey, Bain and BCG. They identified an industry under pressure to improve efficiency while relying on ageing and fragmented technology.

Recruitment agencies typically use applicant tracking and CRM software to manage candidates, clients and placements, often alongside separate tools for sourcing, outreach, note-taking and scheduling. This can require recruiters to manually transfer information between different systems.

Spott brings these functions together in a single AI-native platform, combining candidate management, search, conversations, outreach and automation. The platform turns information from emails, CVs and recruitment pipelines into searchable data, including databases containing up to two million candidates.

The company aims to automate more of the administrative and sourcing work involved in recruitment while leaving consequential decisions with recruiters. Spott does not autonomously move candidates into pipelines or present them to clients without human approval.

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intense pressure to cut costs and make more placements, while their recruiters lost hours moving information between outdated systems.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,

said Lander Degreve, co-founder and CEO of Spott.

The company will use the Series A funding to support international expansion, develop enterprise functionality and advance its agentic AI capabilities. Spott is opening offices in Sydney and New York and plans to grow its workforce and engineering capacity. It will also develop AI features designed to identify vacancies, candidate career moves and recommended next steps.