Investment: “Spott raises $21M”
Spott, an AI-native applicant tracking system (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) platform for recruitment agencies, has raised $21 million in a Series A round led by Balderton Capital.
The round included 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, where they identified an industry under pressure to improve efficiency while relying on ageing and fragmented technology.
Spott brings applicant tracking, CRM and adjacent 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 and can support databases containing up to two million candidates. The company aims to automate administrative and sourcing work while keeping consequential decisions with recruiters; it does not autonomously move candidates into pipelines or present them to clients without human approval.
The Series A funding will be used to support international expansion, develop enterprise functionality and advance the company’s agentic AI capabilities. Spott is opening offices in Sydney and New York and plans to grow its workforce and engineering capacity, as well as build AI features to identify vacancies, candidate career moves and recommended next steps.
“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intense pressure to cut costs and make more placements, while their recruiters lost hours moving information between outdated systems.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.
