Spott raises $21M Series A for AI-native recruitment software

Spott, the Leuven startup building an AI-native ATS and CRM for recruitment agencies, has raised a $21M (EUR 18.3M) Series A led by Balderton Capital, with Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino Capital participating.

The round, announced on 22 September 2026, takes the company’s total funding to roughly $24M, eighteen months after a $3.2M seed led by Base10 Partners in March 2025. The new capital funds a push into the US and APAC, with offices planned in New York and Sydney, new enterprise features, and engineering hires focused on agentic AI. The team grows from 44 people today to around 60 by year end.

“Recruitment succeeds through trust and human judgement. Spott gives agencies control of their data and puts AI to work around their recruiters,” said co-founder and CEO Lander Degreve in the announcement.

A ten-times revenue year gets a Series A

The numbers behind the cheque are the story. Spott reports revenue up more than tenfold since the start of 2026, with hundreds of recruitment agencies on the platform, including H.W. Anderson and CGP Group, a 200-person firm operating across 12 countries. The geographic split is already unusual for a two-year-old Belgian company: roughly 20% of revenue comes from APAC and 15% from the US, the rest from Europe. Those are company-reported figures, but they are exactly the kind of pull that gets a London growth investor to lead before the metrics plateau.

All three institutional backers from the seed – Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino Capital – returned for the A. Balderton is new to the cap table, and quick with it: this is the firm’s second European lead announced in two days, after Unit1 Studio’s £20M round in London.

Three consultants rebuilding the recruiter’s back office

Spott was founded in 2024 by university friends Lander Degreve (CEO), Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys, who left McKinsey, Bain and BCG to build it and went through Y Combinator along the way. The product replaces the two systems every agency runs on – the applicant tracking system and the CRM – with one platform designed around AI from the first line of code. Emails, CVs and pipeline conversations become structured, searchable data; outreach, interview scheduling and reporting run through the same system, with automation handling the plumbing. The largest customer databases on the platform hold up to two million candidates, per the company.

That AI-native framing is doing real work here. Recruitment agencies were early and heavy software buyers, and most still run on systems designed well before large language models existed, where AI arrives as a bolted-on feature rather than the architecture. Spott’s bet is that the difference is structural, not cosmetic: when the system reads every CV and every email thread natively, the recruiter stops doing data entry and spends the day on the part of the job that actually wins placements.

An ATS market past $3bn, growing at 8.1%

The software layer Spott sells into is sizeable and growing steadily rather than explosively: the global applicant tracking system market is worth $3.17bn in 2026 and forecast to reach $4.33bn by 2030, an 8.1% CAGR (The Business Research Company, September 2026). The prize is bigger than the category, though. An agency that consolidates its ATS, CRM, outreach and analytics spend onto one platform is buying several line items at once, which is how a steady-growth market can still produce venture-scale outcomes.

For scale against our own records: Spott’s raise sits alongside Magentic’s $18M Series A for AI agents in procurement, announced five days earlier – two European Series As in the same week backing the same thesis, agentic AI applied to an unglamorous, labour-heavy business function.

What Leuven says about vertical AI in Europe

So why are generalist funds suddenly leading rounds in recruitment software? The pattern we keep seeing in our funding data is AI-native challengers going after twenty-year-old vertical systems of record – procurement, compliance, now recruitment. The reality is that these categories were written off as sleepy for a decade. The silver lining of that neglect is that the incumbents’ architecture is now old enough to be genuinely hard to retrofit, which gives a 2024-founded company a real window rather than a feature race.

Leuven is a fitting place to run that play from. The town gave Europe imec and one of its great research universities; it is not where anyone predicted the recruitment stack would be rebuilt, and that is rather the point. This is Belgian B2B software with Fortino’s local backing and Y Combinator’s network behind it, selling into London, Sydney and New York from day one. Remember: a fifth of Spott’s revenue already comes from APAC, before the Sydney office even exists.

What to watch over the next twelve months: whether the agency mid-market consolidates onto AI-native stacks, and whether the incumbents can retrofit faster than the challengers can add the enterprise features this round pays for. The contest for the recruiter’s system of record is now properly funded on both sides. Watch the agency stack.