How a Belgian Startup's $21 Million Bet Could Reshape Global Recruitment

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-22

Here's a story you don't hear every day. A startup from Leuven, Belgium, just landed a massive $21 million Series A round to tackle a problem that's been hiding in plain sight. We're talking about recruitment, an industry that's somehow stayed tangled in outdated tech while the rest of the world moved on. Spott is the company behind this push. It's an AI-native platform built specifically for recruitment agencies, combining applicant tracking and customer relationship management into one unified workspace. The round was led by Balderton Capital, with Base10 Partners, Y Combinator, and Fortino joining in. This comes after a $3.2 million Seed round they closed back in March 2025. ### The Backstory: Consultants Spotting a Broken System The founders—Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren, and Samuel Smeys—came from a background of advising recruitment businesses at top consulting firms like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG. They kept seeing the same pattern: an industry ready for change but held back by software that was decades behind. Phil Chambers, a Partner at Balderton Capital, put it bluntly: "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." ### The Core Problem: Where Do Recruiters' Hours Really Go? Think about a typical recruiter's day. Spott's analysis suggests that only about 20% of their workload involves actual human judgment—the stuff you can't automate, like building trust and making final placement decisions. The other 80%? It's swallowed by administrative tasks and candidate sourcing. That's the gap Spott aims to fill. They're not trying to replace recruiters; they're trying to free them. The platform uses AI to handle the grunt work—sorting through emails, parsing CVs, managing databases—so that people can focus on the human side of the equation. ### Rapid Growth and a Global Footprint The numbers tell a compelling story. Spott launched its core platform just six months after its Seed round. Since the start of 2026, they say revenue has grown more than tenfold. They now serve hundreds of agencies across Europe, the US, and the Asia-Pacific region from their headquarters in Leuven. Notable clients include firms like H.W. Anderson and the CGP Group, a 200-person agency that has deployed Spott across 12 different countries. ### The Vision: Defragmenting a Scattered Tech Stack Most recruitment agencies are stuck with a patchwork of legacy tools. They might have one system for candidate databases, another for sourcing, another for outreach and scheduling. Information gets trapped in silos, and recruiters waste hours just moving data from one place to another. Spott's goal is to bring it all together into what they call an "AI-native workspace." The idea is to turn all that scattered data—emails, CVs, pipeline info—into something searchable and actionable. It's about giving agencies control back over their own operations. Currently, about 20% of Spott's revenue comes from the APAC region, with another 15% from the US. ### What the CEO Says Lander Degreve, Spott's co-founder and CEO, summed up the mission: "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." ### What's Next: Offices in New York and Sydney So, where's that $21 million going? The plan is aggressive: - Fuel expansion into the US and APAC markets. - Develop new enterprise-level features. - Hire more engineers to build out advanced, "agentic" AI capabilities. They're planning to open physical offices in Sydney and New York, and they aim to grow their team from 44 people to around 60 by the end of the year. It's a clear signal that this Belgian startup isn't thinking locally; they're playing a global game from day one. The big question now is whether Spott can become the operating system that finally modernizes the recruitment world. If they succeed, it could change how talent finds opportunity everywhere.