Leuven-based Spott raises €18.3 million to build the AI-native operating system for recruitment agencies
Spott, a Leuven-based AI-native applicant tracking system (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) platform for recruitment agencies, has raised €18.3 million ($21 million) in a Series A round.
The round was led by Balderton Capital with participation from Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino. The Series A funding follows a €2.8 million ($3.2 million) Seed funding round raised in March 2025.
“Lander, Manu and Samuel understood this overlooked problem because they had seen its operational and commercial impact first-hand. They have combined that insight with the technical ambition to rebuild recruitment’s core infrastructure and the speed at which customers are adopting Spott shows they have built the solution this market has been waiting for,” said Phil Chambers, Partner at Balderton Capital.
Founded in 2024 by Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys, Spott grew out of the trio’s experience advising recruitment businesses at McKinsey, Bain and BCG. During this time, they observed an industry open to modernisation but held back by outdated, disconnected software.
The company argues that human judgement accounts for only about a fifth of a recruiter’s workload, with the rest consumed by administrative tasks and candidate sourcing, which it says AI can handle, leaving people in charge of final decisions.
Spott serves recruitment firms across Europe, the US and APAC from its Leuven headquarters. Its core platform launched only six months after its Seed round, and the company says its revenue has grown more than tenfold since the start of 2026. It now counts hundreds of agencies as customers, including H.W. Anderson and the 200-person CGP Group, which has deployed the platform across 12 countries.
Recruitment agencies rely on a combination of legacy tools such as separate systems for candidate databases, sourcing, outreach, note-taking, and scheduling. Spott wants to defragment the space with an AI-native workspace capable of turning emails, CVs, and pipeline data, including candidate databases, into searchable and actionable intelligence. It says roughly 20% of the revenue currently comes from the APAC region and 15% from the US.
“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intense pressure to cut costs and make more placements, while their recruiters lost hours moving information between outdated systems.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 Degreve, co-founder and CEO of Spott.
The new funding will be used to support the company’s expansion into the US and APAC, new enterprise features, and hire additional engineers to build out agentic AI capabilities. Spott plans to open offices in Sydney and New York and grow headcount from 44 to around 60 by the end of the year.
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