Balderton Leads $21M Series A for Recruitment Platform Spott
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Spott has closed a $21 million Series A round led by Balderton Capital, with Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino also taking part. The startup builds an AI-native applicant tracking system and CRM for recruitment agencies.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Spott was founded in Leuven in 2024 by university friends Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys. The three had worked with recruitment businesses during stints at McKinsey, Bain and BCG. What they saw was an industry being pushed to become more efficient while still running on ageing, fragmented technology.
A typical agency tracks candidates, clients and placements in applicant tracking and CRM software, then adds separate tools for sourcing, outreach, note-taking and scheduling. Recruiters often end up copying information by hand from one system into another.
Spott folds all of that into one platform covering candidate management, search, conversations, outreach and automation. It turns information from emails, CVs and recruitment pipelines into searchable data, including candidate databases that hold up to two million people. The software takes on more of the admin and sourcing load, while consequential decisions stay with recruiters. Spott does not move candidates into pipelines or present them to clients on its own without a human signing off.
The California company will use the new money to expand internationally, build out enterprise functionality and push its agentic AI capabilities further. It is opening offices in Sydney and New York and plans to grow its workforce and engineering capacity. AI features in development are designed to identify vacancies, catch candidate career moves and suggest next steps.
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