Spott raises $21M to replace the recruiting software its founders once worked around

Why it matters

Spott is using a $21M round to move from automating recruiting tasks to replacing agencies' core software. Its reported growth shows demand; winning long-established customer databases is the harder test.

Lander Degreve and his co-founders have raised $21 million for Spott, the recruiting-agency software they built after encountering the same problem in their consulting work: recruiters moving candidate information between systems that could store it but struggled to put it to use. Axios Pro first reported the Series A, which Spott and its lead investor announced on September 22nd.

Degreve worked at Bain, Manu Vanderveeren at McKinsey and Samuel Smeys at BCG. The three met while studying at KU Leuven. Spott's account of its origins says each encountered recruiting agencies whose staff copied information among inboxes, spreadsheets and applicant-tracking systems. They initially considered adding AI to existing software, then chose to build a replacement. During Y Combinator's Winter 2025 program, their candidate-report-writing tool grew into a full applicant-tracking system and customer-relationship manager.

That decision explains the size of the bet. Selling an agency a report writer requires winning one workflow. Selling it the system that holds candidate records, client relationships and placement history requires persuading the agency to move its working database. Spott's Series A gives the founders capital to make that switch viable for larger, multi-country customers, rather than leaving the product as another tool alongside an incumbent system. That is an inference from Spott's product history and its stated plans for the funding.

From report writer to system of record

Balderton Capital led the round. Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino participated, bringing Spott's reported total funding to $24.2 million. The prior $3.2 million seed was led by Base10, with Y Combinator, True Equity and Fortino participating. Balderton says the new money will fund international expansion, enterprise features and AI capabilities that surface vacancies, candidate career moves and suggested next steps.

Spott combines candidate and client records with search, outreach, interview notes, scheduling and pipeline management. Its pitch is that an agency should be able to search across CVs and past conversations, then act on a result without assembling context from separate applications. Spott says its software can work with databases of up to two million candidates. The founders say recruiters remain responsible for consequential choices: Spott does not submit someone to a client or advance a candidate without human approval.

The architecture is central to Degreve's argument. Spott says it built vector search alongside a conventional relational database so recruiters can find context in conversations, rather than rely solely on fields and keywords. That is a description of Spott's design, not proof that its search produces better placements than a rival's.

Spott says more than 500 agencies use the platform and that revenue has grown more than tenfold since the beginning of 2026. According to Spott's origin story, its annual recurring revenue was around €100,000 in October 2025 and crossed €1 million four months later. The company says H.W. Anderson made more than 100,000 candidate profiles and years of correspondence searchable, while CGP Group rolled out Spott across 12 countries. Its claim that placements increased by up to 30% among customers describes an upper-end result, not an average outcome for agencies that switch.

The incumbents already have AI

Spott's replacement pitch faces competitors selling much of the same workflow. Bullhorn markets an integrated applicant-tracking system and CRM with AI features inside its existing platform. Loxo also offers a shared candidate and client database, search and automated record updates. Loxo has publicly challenged Spott's characterizations of its product, including the suggestion that Loxo's AI was merely added to an older system. Those competing product descriptions make "AI-native" a positioning claim; agencies still have to judge search quality, migration and day-to-day use for themselves.

Spott is putting some of the round behind that migration and rollout challenge. Its investor says roughly 20% of revenue comes from Asia-Pacific and 15% from the US; both figures are company-supplied. Spott has named former McKinsey consultant Tycho De Saeytyd to lead its US expansion from New York and is building out operations in Sydney. Balderton says Spott plans to grow from 44 employees to around 60 by year-end, with engineering capacity a priority.

Degreve, Vanderveeren and Smeys started with a narrow task recruiters wanted done faster. Balderton is financing their attempt to own the place where those tasks, and the underlying candidate and client data, come together. Spott's reported adoption gives that attempt a foothold. The harder test is whether agencies with years of records and established routines will trust a young platform with the whole operation.