What doesn't change
Three offices, one product, one roadmap. We are not building a different Spott for each region, and we are not pausing the work to go build a company. Your data stays yours, and you can take it with you.
Why we raised
We've raised a $21 million Series A led by Balderton Capital, with Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino Ventures joining again. That brings our total to $24.2 million, after the $3.2 million seed we raised in March 2025.
The three of us met as students in Leuven. We went on to McKinsey, Bain and BCG, and each of us spent years working with recruitment agencies across Europe, the UK and the Middle East.
We kept seeing the same thing from three different chairs. Good recruiters losing hours a day to the same handful of tasks. Copying information from one tool into another. Updating records after a call. Looking for someone they knew was in the database somewhere, and not finding them.
Only about 20% of a recruiter's job is judgement: reading a person, holding a client relationship, knowing when to push a deal and when to wait. That 20% is the whole thing an agency sells. The other 80% goes into admin and sourcing.
You probably recognise the split. You finish a good conversation, then spend the next half hour making sure your software knows what you just learned.
Most agencies have an old ATS plus a sourcing tool, an outreach tool, a note-taker and a scheduler. None of them really talk to each other, so you end up being the thing that holds them together.
Before: the same record, typed into five tools.
We started Spott in 2024 to turn that around, so the software does the catching up and you get the day back. Replacing recruiters was never the plan. It still isn't.
What an AI-native operating system means
Your agency has already collected everything it needs. CVs, emails, call notes, years of conversations with people you placed and people you didn't. You should be able to use all of it without remembering which tool, folder or colleague has the missing piece.
That is what Spott is. Candidate and client management, search, conversations, outreach and automation in one place, including databases with up to two million candidates in them.
At H.W. Anderson, more than 100,000 candidate profiles became searchable, and their recruiters started placing people they would have walked past before. Across our customers, placements are up by as much as 30%.
One thing we decided early and won't change: you decide who enters a pipeline and who goes in front of a client. As Spott takes on more of the work, those decisions stay yours. That is what separates an AI-native ATS from an old system with a chat box bolted on the side.
Why Balderton
Balderton has spent more than 25 years backing European founders, including the teams behind Revolut, GoCardless and Wayve. They understood the problem in the first meeting, which is rare for software built for an industry this old.
"Lander, Manu and Samuel understood this overlooked problem because they had seen its operational and commercial impact first-hand. They have combined that insight with the technical ambition to rebuild recruitment's core infrastructure, and the speed at which customers are adopting Spott shows they have built the solution this market has been waiting for."
Phil Chambers, Partner at Balderton Capital
Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino Ventures backed our seed, and all three came back for this round. They have been with us since before Spott launched, so they know exactly what they are backing again.
Where the money goes
Four things, in the order you will notice them.
Teams in New York and Sydney. Around 20% of our revenue comes from APAC and 15% from the US, and until now all of it was served from one European time zone. We announced both offices earlier this year, and this round allows us to build out the teams in them. Questions about onboarding, migration or the product get answered during your working day instead of the day after.
13 of 24hours covered
Engineering. We go from 44 people to around 60 by the end of the year, and most of those are engineers. More of the roadmap, sooner.
Larger agencies. CGP Group is rolling out Spott to 200 people across 12 countries. Rollouts that size come with real requirements: who can see what, what the reporting has to show, how separate offices and brands fit together. We would rather build for that properly than one exception at a time.
AI that works ahead of you. Spott already brings things in your data to your attention: a role that just opened at a client you know well, someone whose circumstances have changed since you last spoke, a deal that has gone quiet. This round makes it spot more of them and tell you sooner, while there is still time to do something about it.
A raise is mostly permission to keep going. We are back at it tomorrow.
To the agencies that trusted us early, told us what was broken and stayed while we fixed it: thank you. Much of what recruiters use today started as a conversation with one of you. Keep them coming.
And if you have not seen Spott yet, bring your own database and we will show you what it does with it. Book a demo. We will find a time that works in your time zone.
Lander, Manu and Samuel
