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

Spott has picked up $21 million in Series A funding for an AI-native system built for recruitment agencies. Balderton Capital led the round, with Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino also in the mix.

The company was founded in Leuven in 2024 by university friends Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys. Their pitch comes from time spent around recruitment businesses while working at McKinsey, Bain and BCG, where they saw an industry trying to do more with older, scattered software.

That software mess is the real target. Agencies usually juggle applicant tracking and CRM tools alongside separate products for sourcing, outreach, note-taking and scheduling, which leaves recruiters copying data from one place to another. Spott tries to collapse those jobs into one platform, combining candidate management, search, conversations, outreach and automation.

The system also turns information from emails, CVs and recruitment pipelines into searchable data, including databases with up to two million candidates. But the company is careful about how far the AI goes. It does not automatically move candidates into pipelines or send them to clients without a person approving the step.

The money will go toward international expansion, enterprise features and more agentic AI work. Spott is opening offices in Sydney and New York, while also planning to grow its workforce and engineering capacity. It also wants AI features that can spot vacancies, candidate career moves and suggested next steps.