Spott, the AI-native applicant tracking system (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) platform for recruitment agencies, has raised $21 million in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Base10Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino. The funding will support international expansion, enterprise functionality and new proactive, agentic AI capabilities.
Spott aims to make relationships and decision-making almost the entire role of a recruiter. It estimates that human judgement currently accounts for only 20% of the job, with administration and sourcing consuming much of the remaining time. Its AI automates that work while keeping recruiters in control.
The round follows Spott’s $3.2 million seed, announced in March 2025. Spott launched its core platform six months later and has grown revenue more than tenfold since the start of 2026.Hundreds of agencies now use Spott to unlock their data and make more placements.
Spott generates approximately 20% of its revenue in APAC and 15% in the US. Customers include H.W. Anderson and 200-person CGP Group, which has rolled out the platform across 12 countries.
Founded in Leuven in 2024 by university friends Lander Degrève, Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys, Spott emerged from their work with recruitment businesses at McKinsey, Bain and BCG. They saw an industry under pressure to become more efficient but constrained by ageing, fragmented technology. Degrève has led Spott’s product development and built a global customer success function without increasing headcount. Vanderveeren closed every sale during the platform’s launch year before leading its expansion into APAC, helping drive the company’s substantial revenue growth in 2026.
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between outdated systems.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.
— Lander Degrève, co-founder and CEO of Spott
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.
— Phil Chambers, Partner at Balderton Capital
