Belgium-Based Spott Bags $21 Million Series A to Transform Recruitment With AI

Leuven, Belgium, 22 September, 2026: Spott, the AI-native applicant tracking system (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) platform for recruitment agencies, has raised $21 million in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino. The funding will support international expansion, enterprise functionality and new proactive, agentic AI capabilities.

Spott aims to make relationships and decision-making almost the entire role of a recruiter. It estimates that human judgement currently accounts for only 20% of the job, with administration and sourcing consuming much of the remaining time. Its AI automates that work while keeping recruiters in control.

The round follows Spott’s $3.2 million seed, announced in March 2025. Spott launched its core platform six months later and has grown revenue more than tenfold since the start of 2026. Hundreds of agencies now use Spott to unlock their data and make more placements.

Spott generates approximately 20% of its revenue in APAC and 15% in the US. Customers include H.W. Anderson and 200-person CGP Group, which has rolled out the platform across 12 countries.

Founded in Leuven in 2024 by university friends Lander Degrève, Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys, Spott emerged from their work with recruitment businesses at McKinsey, Bain and BCG. They saw an industry under pressure to become more efficient but constrained by ageing, fragmented technology. Degrève has led Spott’s product development and built a global customer success function without increasing headcount. Vanderveeren closed every sale during the platform’s launch year before leading its expansion into APAC, helping drive the company’s substantial revenue growth in 2026.

Spott Builds an AI-Native Operating System for Recruitment

Recruitment agencies depend on applicant tracking and customer relationship management software to manage candidates, clients and placements. Yet many combine decades-old systems with separate sourcing, outreach, note-taking and scheduling tools, forcing recruiters to transfer information manually between products.

Spott replaces this patchwork with one AI-native platform that unifies candidate management, search, conversations, outreach, and automation. It turns emails, CVs and pipelines, including databases of up to two million candidates, into searchable, actionable intelligence.

Spott says its customer data indicates that the platform can increase placements, and therefore agency revenue, by up to 30%. At H.W. Anderson, it made more than 100,000 candidate profiles and years of conversations searchable, helping recruiters find candidates faster and close placements.

Recruiters retain control of consequential decisions: Spott does not autonomously move candidates into pipelines or present them to clients without human approval.

Spott is opening offices in Sydney and New York and plans to grow from 44 to around 60 employees by year-end. The funding will significantly expand engineering capacity and accelerate AI capabilities that proactively surface vacancies, candidate career moves and recommended next steps.

“During our work with recruitment businesses, we saw firms under intense pressure to cut costs and make more placements, while their recruiters lost hours moving information between outdated systems. Recruitment succeeds through trust and human judgement. Spott gives agencies control of their data and puts AI to work around their recruiters, freeing them to deepen relationships with candidates and clients.” — Lander Degrève, co-founder and CEO of Spott

“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

About Spott

Spott is the AI-native ATS and CRM for recruitment agencies. Its all-in-one platform helps recruiters manage candidates, clients and vacancies; search and match talent; capture conversations; run personalised outreach; prepare candidate presentations; and automate repetitive workflows. Founded in Leuven, Belgium, Spott serves recruitment firms across Europe, the US and APAC.

About Balderton Capital

Balderton Capital is a multistage venture firm with more than 25 years of experience supporting Europe’s best founders from Seed to IPO. We have both early and growth funds and invest across the technology sector, with a proven track record backing AI, fintech, B2BSaaS, digital health, mobility, gaming and marketplace companies. Previous investments include Darktrace (LON: DARK), Depop, Dream Games, Flywire (NASDAQ: FLYW), Kobalt, MySQL, Nutmeg, Peakon, Recorded Future, Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) and THG (LON: THG). Balderton’s current portfolio includes: Aircall, Contentful, Cleo, Fuse, GoCardless (Mollie), Lendable, Matillion, Photoroom, Primer, Proxima Fusion, Quantum Systems, Revolut, The Exploration Company, Tibber, Wayve, Writer and ZOE.