Leuven, Belgium-based Spott announced on September 22, 2026, that it has closed a $21 million Series A led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino, to scale its AI-native applicant-tracking system and CRM for recruitment and staffing firms.
Founders' Playbook: Rebuild What They Had To Work Around
Spott was founded in 2024 by CEO Lander Degrève, COO Manu Vanderveeren and CTO Samuel Smeys, all of whom previously spent years working around the limitations of legacy applicant-tracking software at recruiting firms. The company has grown revenue more than tenfold since early 2026, and now serves recruitment agencies across Europe.
Vector Search Meets Agentic Outreach
The Spott platform combines candidate and client records with vector search alongside relational databases, giving recruiters context-aware discovery on top of structured pipeline data. Layered on that are agentic AI workflows that surface vacancies, spot candidate career moves and suggest next steps — the kind of proactive routing that legacy ATS products cannot do without human triage.
New Offices In New York And Sydney
With the new capital, Spott has already opened offices in New York and Sydney to serve the US and Asia-Pacific markets, and plans to expand enterprise-grade features and deepen its agentic capabilities. The round underscores investor appetite for vertical AI-native SaaS as generic ATS incumbents such as Bullhorn and Salesforce face mounting pressure from AI-first challengers.
Context
Spott's raise arrives in a week when venture funding for AI-native infrastructure remained near record highs, and joins other agentic-AI vertical bets tracked in TheRoboticsMedia's Funding & Investments desk.
Reporting based on coverage from Runtime Wire, EU-Startups and TechStartups.