Estel Technologies raises €270K to modernise tech staffing sales

Tech staffing sales has a data problem nobody outside the industry thinks about much. Recruiters spend hours chasing job postings that are already filled, duplicated across ten job boards, or simply stale. Sofia-based Estel Technologies wants to fix that mess, and it just picked up €270,000 in pre-seed funding to do it, led by Vitosha Ventures with a check from Austrian angel investor Kerem Basak, who runs FB Consulting.

The three founders, Bogdan Stavrev, Ivo Michorov and Yusuf Berki, built an AI workspace that folds several jobs into one screen: verifying that a hiring need is real, scoring how good the lead actually is, and matching it to the buyer most likely to sign. That's normally three or four separate tools stitched together with spreadsheets and guesswork. Estel's pitch is that collapsing them into a single system saves recruiters from the guessing game entirely.

The centerpiece is something called a Demand Confidence Score, which crunches market signals to figure out whether a hiring need is genuinely active before a salesperson wastes a pitch on it. It then ranks opportunities and pairs them with prospective buyers automatically, essentially doing the triage work a junior sales rep would spend a week on.

€270,000 isn't a huge sum by AI-startup standards, but the plan is fairly specific: sharpen the verification and matching algorithms, push into more European markets, and use that traction to build toward a seed round. There's also a US expansion penciled in for 2027, which is an ambitious timeline for a team this size, though not an unreasonable one if the core scoring tech proves out with European staffing firms first.