Lander met Manu and Samuel in their second year at KU Leuven, through BRIKS, a student investment club. The friendship outlasted university: holidays together, then parallel consulting careers in Brussels.

After a master's in finance at Bocconi University in Milan, he joined Bain & Company, where he led strategy projects across HR-tech and recruiting operations and built an AI job-matching tool inside the firm. The pattern on client work was hard to ignore: recruiters spending half their day logging activity instead of placing people.

In late 2024 he quit consulting with Manu and Samuel to build a recruiting platform that is AI-native from the first line of code. Spott went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and raised a $3.2M seed led by Base10 Partners.

"The rise of AI presents an opportunity for a fundamental shift in how recruiting technology should work."

Lander has stayed a builder first. He splits his week between customer conversations and the codebase, and his writing draws on both: what recruiting firms actually need, and what it takes to build it.

Manu met Lander and Samuel in their second year at KU Leuven, in the weekly meetings of BRIKS, a student investment club. Six years later the three quit their consulting jobs in the same season to start a company together.

After KU Leuven he took a master's in financial analysis at London Business School, then joined McKinsey & Company, working on strategy, HR projects, and tech due diligence, with earlier internships at Morgan Stanley and CVC. Consulting gave him a recurring view of recruiting firms across Europe, the UK, and the Middle East, and the same observation every time: great recruiters trapped in software built fifteen years ago.

"AI is all about context. If your note taker has no access to your database, it has no clue how to update it. Integrations and AI just don't match: you need an all-in-one platform."

At Spott, Manu owns everything business-side: growth, hiring, go-to-market, and the machinery that took the company from its first paying customer to agencies worldwide. The goal was never to replace recruiters: it's to give them superpowers.

Samuel met Lander and Manu in their second year at KU Leuven, through BRIKS, a student investment club. While his co-founders went deep on strategy, he went deep on the math.

He took a master's in statistics at the London School of Economics, with an exchange at Wharton, then joined BCG, where he built data and machine-learning pipelines for recruiting agencies across the UK, the US, and Europe. The diagnosis was consistent: the industry's problem wasn't a lack of data, it was systems that store data without understanding it.

That conviction is why Spott was built from scratch rather than as a layer on legacy tools. As CTO, Samuel owns the platform end to end, from the data model to the ML systems behind matching and automation.

Tycho spent four years at McKinsey & Company, rising from junior associate to Senior Engagement Manager on strategy work for banks and tech companies across Brussels, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo, Toronto, and New York. Before consulting he was a data and insights analyst at Telenet, where he learned a lesson he still repeats: data only matters if someone acts on it.

In 2026 he left McKinsey to join Spott and moved to New York to open the company's largest market. In his first quarter he talked to more than 250 recruiting agencies across the US and kept hearing the same three things: nobody actually likes their ATS, every step of the hire lives in a different tool, and what keeps firms stuck is not price.

"Fear keeps more recruiters on bad software than money ever does."

That field view is what he writes from. Tycho is Spott's face in the US recruiting community: he represents the company as an Allied Firm member of NAPS, co-hosts sessions with industry voices like Lou Adler, and spends most days showing recruiting firms what an AI-native platform changes about their work.