Leuven-Based Spott Raises €18.3 Million to Build an AI-Native Operating System for Recruitment Agencies

Leuven-based Spott has raised €18.3 million ($21 million) in a Series A round to expand its AI-native platform for recruitment and staffing agencies. The round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino. The new funding follows a €2.8 million ($3.2 million) Seed round raised in March 2025.

Founded in 2024 by Lander Degrève, Manu Vanderveeren, and Samuel Smeys, Spott grew out of the founders' experience advising recruitment businesses at Bain, McKinsey and BCG. They saw recruiters relying on disconnected systems for candidate databases, sourcing, outreach, notes and scheduling, creating significant administrative work around the actual recruitment process.

Spott combines applicant tracking, customer relationship management, candidate search, conversations, outreach and automation in a single AI-native workspace. Its platform can turn information from CVs, emails, candidate databases and recruitment pipelines into searchable and actionable intelligence, including databases containing up to two million candidates. The company is designed to automate repetitive sourcing and administrative tasks while keeping important recruitment decisions with human recruiters.

The company says its platform launched just six months after its Seed round and that revenue has grown more than tenfold since the beginning of 2026. Spott now serves hundreds of recruitment agencies across Europe, the US and APAC, including H.W. Anderson and the 200-person CGP Group, which has deployed the platform across 12 countries. Around 20% of its revenue currently comes from APAC and 15% from the US.

The new funding will support Spott's international expansion, particularly in the US and APAC, alongside new enterprise features and further development of its agentic AI capabilities. The company is opening offices in New York and Sydney and plans to increase its team from 44 employees to around 60 by the end of 2026.

With its AI-native approach, Spott aims to replace the patchwork of legacy recruitment tools with a single operating system that helps agencies manage candidate and client data, automate workflows and spend more time on the human relationships at the centre of recruitment.