Spott Raises $21M as U.S. Recruitment Push Accelerates

Belgian recruitment software company Spott has raised $21 million in Series A funding as it accelerates an American expansion that is already taking shape in New York.

The round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Base10 Partners, Y Combinator and Fortino.

Spott says the funding will support international expansion, enterprise functionality and new agentic AI capabilities designed to automate more of the administrative work handled by recruiters.

America is already producing revenue

Spott's U.S. story is stronger than a simple future expansion plan.

The company says around 15% of its revenue already comes from the United States, while American demand has grown quickly enough for the market to become one of its main international priorities.

Customers include U.S.-based recruitment firm H.W. Anderson, while the company is expanding its commercial footprint to support more American agencies locally.

Spott says its overall revenue has grown more than tenfold since the beginning of 2026.

Why New York

Spott began building its local U.S. presence earlier this year and selected New York as its American base.

The company says the city gives it direct access to one of the country's largest concentrations of staffing and executive-search firms.

Former McKinsey consultant Tycho De Saeytyd was appointed Head of U.S. to build the operation on the ground.

Spott has said it wants to build a local team of around 10 people by the end of 2026, spanning functions such as sales, partnerships and customer support.

The company is also recruiting a founding account executive in New York to own the U.S. sales motion and work closely with the founders on how the business approaches American agencies.

An AI-native replacement for recruitment software

Spott is building an applicant-tracking and customer-relationship-management platform specifically for recruitment agencies.

Rather than adding AI features on top of an older recruitment system, the company describes its product as AI-native from the ground up.

Its software combines candidate data, client information, jobs, search, meeting notes, enrichment, communication and workflow automation in one system.

The idea is to automate repetitive administrative work so recruiters can spend more time on candidate and client relationships.

From Leuven to Y Combinator to New York

Spott was founded in Belgium by Lander Degreve, Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys.

The company went through Y Combinator and raised a $3.2 million seed round before launching its core platform.

Its latest Series A brings substantially more capital at a moment when the company is moving from early international adoption toward building permanent teams in major overseas markets.

Spott is also opening an office in Sydney, reflecting demand outside Europe as well as in the United States.

Funding expansion after proving demand

One of the more notable aspects of Spott's expansion is the order in which it has happened.

The company first won American customers from Europe, then appointed U.S. leadership and opened a New York office, and is now raising a larger round to accelerate what already appears to be working.

That is a different risk profile from raising a large funding round first and only then testing whether the U.S. market is interested.

What this means for European companies

Spott shows how quickly the U.S. can become strategically important for a young European B2B company when customers begin pulling the business across the Atlantic.

The company did not begin by building a large American organization.

It sold remotely first, validated demand and only then added a Head of U.S., an office and local hiring.

For European founders, that sequence can reduce expansion risk while still creating momentum once the market proves itself.

Spott's new Series A is therefore less about deciding whether to enter America and more about financing the next stage of a U.S. business that is already underway.