Spott co-founders Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren, and Samuel Smeys. Credit: Spott Spott, a Leuven-based startup that sells recruitment agencies an AI-native applicant tracking system and CRM, has raised a $21M Series A led by Balderton Capital. Base10 Partners, Y Combinator, and Fortino also took part. Spott launched its main platform six months after the seed round and says its revenue has grown more than tenfold so far this year.
Organizations use applicant tracking and CRM systems to manage job candidates, clients, and placements. However, many still rely on outdated software and separate tools for sourcing, outreach, note-taking, and scheduling, which means recruiters often have to manually copy information between systems. Spott brings together record management, search, messaging, outreach, and workflow automation in a single product. Recruiters can search emails, CVs, and pipelines across candidate databases with up to 2 million records.
The company estimates that judgment accounts for only about one-fifth of a recruiter’s work, with most of the job focused on administration and sourcing. While Spott’s software handles these tasks, it will not move a candidate forward or present them to a client without the recruiter’s approval. Hundreds of agencies use Spott, including H.W. Anderson and the CGP Group, a 200-person company operating in 12 countries.
H.W. Anderson has used Spott to create over 100,000 candidate profiles and make years of correspondence searchable. According to Spott, customer data shows that placements can rise by up to 30%. About 20 percent of Spott’s revenue now comes from the Asia-Pacific region and 15 percent from the United States.
Moreover, the company is opening new offices in Sydney and New York, and expects to grow from 44 to about 60 employees by year-end, mainly in engineering. New features will highlight open positions, track candidates’ career changes, and suggest next steps before recruiters start their search. Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren, and Samuel Smeys, three friends who had worked as consultants at recruitment firms for McKinsey, Bain, and BCG, founded the company in 2024. “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intense pressure to cut costs and make more placements, while their recruiters lost hours moving information between outdated systems.”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 judgment. Spott gives agencies control of their data and puts AI to work around their recruiters, freeing them to deepen relationships with candidates and clients,” said Lander Degreve, co-founder and CEO of Spott.
Phil Chambers, a partner at Balderton, said the founders understood the problem well because they had experienced it themselves. He added that the rapid customer adoption showed Spott had built what the market needed.
