Spott Is Opening Offices in New York and Sydney

TL;DR

• Spott is opening two new offices, in New York and in Sydney, and moving to a much larger office in Leuven.
• We're growing from around 30 people today to roughly 60 by the end of the year, across the three locations. New York alone gets a team of 10 in sales, customer success and partnerships.
• Three-quarters of our revenue already comes from outside Belgium, across more than 300 agencies worldwide.
• What it changes for you: teams in your time zone, onboarding and support during your working hours, and people on the ground who know your market.

Recruitment doesn't stop when Leuven goes home. That's the short version of why we're doing this.

Spott has more than 300 agencies on the platform, and three-quarters of our revenue comes from outside Belgium. Agencies in New York, London, Sydney and Dubai have been running their days on software supported from a single European time zone. That worked while we were small. It doesn't scale, and it isn't the experience we want to give people who trust us with their entire database.

So we're opening offices in New York and Sydney, and moving into a much larger office in Leuven.

Why now

We never had the instinct to prove the product locally first and expand later. We went after the global recruitment industry from day one, and the pull came back faster than we expected.

Over the past year, Spott grew from zero to €3 million in annual revenue. Agencies like United Consulting, CGP Group and H.W. Anderson signed on in recent months. The demand is international, so the company has to be international. Opening offices is the honest response to where our customers actually are.

What changes for the agencies we work with

Here's the practical part, because a new office is only interesting if it changes something for you.

Your time zone, your hours. The New York team covers sales, customer success and partnerships for North America. Sydney does the same for APAC. Onboarding calls, migration support and product questions get answered during your working day, not the next morning.

People who know your market. Contract staffing in the US, permanent placement in the UK and executive search in Australia are different businesses with different workflows. Local teams mean the people configuring your workspace have seen your model before.

Faster migrations. Moving your database to a new CRM is the step agencies dread most. More people in more places means more capacity to sit with you while it happens, in your hours.

The roadmap stays one roadmap. Three offices, one product. We're not building regional versions of Spott. Everyone gets the same platform and the same releases.

How we got here

The three of us, Lander, Samuel and I, met eight years ago as business engineering students. After graduating we each landed separately in consulting, working with recruitment and staffing agencies across Europe, the UK and the Middle East.

Without comparing notes, all three of us kept running into the same thing. Recruiters were spending most of their day typing up call notes instead of placing candidates. Their software stored the data and never did anything with it.

"I watched recruiters spend years manually logging every phone call, copying and pasting between tabs, and losing context. No amount of AI bolted on top fixes a foundation that was never built for it." - Samuel Smeys, co-founder and CTO

So in 2024 we quit our jobs and built a prototype. Y Combinator accepted us into the programme in San Francisco, invested $500,000 and gave us three months to build something ready for the world's biggest investors. After the programme we raised $3.3 million, led by Base10 Partners, with support from Y Combinator, True Equity and Fortino Capital.

Why we built it AI-first

Spott is a single workspace where recruiters manage candidates, vacancies and clients, with AI in the core of the platform rather than bolted onto the side.

In practice that means calls get summarised and logged automatically. A candidate report is generated in one click from a CV and an interview. And if you spoke to someone two months ago about a different role, you don't have to remember them: when a matching vacancy comes in, they resurface on their own. Most recruitment tools make you dig that conversation back up by hand.

"Our competitors bolt five AI tools onto an old database. We were founded after AI already existed, so that infrastructure has been there from day one. That lets us automate around 70% of the recruitment process: matching, outreach, scheduling, notes, reporting. The remaining 30%, the negotiating, reading the click with a candidate, stays human work. That's where good recruiters earn their money, and that's what we give them time for." - Lander Degrève, co-founder and CEO

That's the whole thesis, and it's why an AI-native ATS behaves differently from a legacy system with an AI button.

What's next

Doubling the team by December is the immediate work. After that, the goal hasn't changed since the three of us were sitting in a San Francisco apartment with a prototype: make a lasting impact on the recruitment industry worldwide.

If you're in New York or Sydney and want to see what an AI-native platform actually does with your database, book a demo. We'll have someone in your time zone.