Recruitment startup Spott raises $21M Series A led by Balderton
What's the deal? SpottDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a recruitment management platform, has raised a $21 million Series A led by Balderton Capital, chief executive officer Lander Degreve told Axios Pro. Base10 PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Y Combinator, and Fortino VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → also joined, bringing the company's total funding to $24.2 million.
What's the endgame? Spott is building what it calls an "AI-native operating system" for recruitment agencies. The aim is to replace the patchwork of tools — an applicant tracking system, sourcing, outreach, note-taking, and scheduling — that agencies stitch together today.
Why now? About a year after launch, more than 5,000 recruiters at over 500 agencies use the product. The seed round of $3.2 million closed in March 2025; this raise is meant to speed up development and reach more customers.
How it works: Spott folds candidate and client management, search, conversations, outreach, and automation into one place, handling databases of up to two million candidates. At customer H.W. AndersonDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, more than 100,000 candidate profiles became searchable. Across customers, the company says placements are up by as much as 30%.
Spott argues that only about 20% of a recruiter's job — judgement, client relationships, timing a deal — is the work an agency actually sells. The other 80% goes to admin and sourcing, which the software aims to absorb. "Replacing recruiters was never the plan," the founders wrote.
The three founders met as students in Leuven and later worked at McKinseyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, BainDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and BCGDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, advising recruitment agencies across Europe, the UK, and the Middle East.
Investor view: Balderton has backed European founders for more than 25 years, including Revolut, GoCardless, and Wayve. The founders "had seen its operational and commercial impact first-hand" and paired that with "the technical ambition to rebuild recruitment's core infrastructure," the firm said.
The signal: The round sits near the top of its class — above the 94th percentile among all-time Series A rounds in Belgium's jobs and recruitment sector, based on a sample of 246 deals. That points to investor appetite for AI tools targeting older, tool-fragmented industries.
Read more: spott.io
Image credit: Spott
