Overview
Lander Degrève is co-founder and CEO of Spott, an AI-native applicant tracking system and CRM for recruiting firms. The company was founded in 2024 with Manu Vanderveeren, who is COO, and Samuel Smeys, who is CTO. At Bain, Degrève built an AI job match tool, and he built a GenAI consulting-case interviewer as a side project. His background is in financial statistics, with an internship in investment banking at JPMorgan and a master's degree from Bocconi. Spott went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, which invested $500,000, and pivoted mid-programme from a candidate report writer to a full AI-native ATS. In May 2025 the company raised a $3.2 million seed round led by Base10 Partners, with Y Combinator, Fortino Capital, True Equity and angel investors participating. The platform unifies applicant tracking, CRM, multi-channel outreach and AI agents in one system, and covers permanent, temporary, contracting and executive search work. Spott is headquartered in Leuven and San Francisco, with offices in New York City and Sydney, and has 40 team members. It serves more than 400 agencies. Named customers include Stanton Chase, Pauwels Solutions Group, H.W. Anderson, United Consulting, CGP Group, Kennedy Fitch and ntiative.
Degrève studied business engineering at KU Leuven, where he met Manu Vanderveeren and Samuel Smeys, and holds a master's degree from Bocconi. He interned in investment banking at JPMorgan before moving into consulting at Bain, where he built an AI job match tool and, separately, a GenAI consulting-case interviewer. The founders first tried layering AI onto existing platforms including Bullhorn and Salesforce, concluded the relational database architecture underneath could not support contextual understanding, and decided to build from scratch. They left consulting, built a prototype and were accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, which put in $500,000. Halfway through the programme they pivoted from a candidate report writer to a complete AI-native ATS. They based engineering in Leuven for access to KU Leuven graduates. The $3.2 million seed round led by Base10 Partners followed in May 2025, and Spott has since opened offices in New York City and Sydney.
As CEO of Spott, Degrève leads the Company Building an AI-Native applicant tracking system for staffing and recruitment agencies. Spott went through Y Combinator's W25 batch and raised a $3.2M seed round led by Fortino Ventures in May 2025.
Career history
Media & appearances
- Recruitment TechYouTubeInterview: Lander Degrève (Spott) over AI-first ATS én Y Combinator-programma in San FranciscoLander Degrève discusses how he and his co-founders transitioned from consulting work in Brussels to founding Spott, an AI-first recruitment platform, after observing inefficiencies in existing ATS systems that had not innovated significantly in years. He explains that their key differentiator is building AI capabilities from the ground up into their platform rather than adding it as an afterthought, which they believe will create competitive advantages for recruiters and allow them to demonstrate the potential of AI in recruitment over the coming years.
- Recruitment TVYouTubeThe Automated Agency What AI Native Recruitment Actually Looks Like
In the news
- Spott is enterprise ready. At the start of the year, we had little enterprise controls or infrastructure. And no dedicated customer success team or forward deployed engineers. But there was clear demand from larger agencies that no longer wanted to trade off advanced AI for enterprise controls (or vice versa). So we invested heavily in building tools and services for large teams. Here’s what that looks like today 👇 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀 → Data migrations → Workflow consultation support → Team training and
- 5 years ago, just before starting at MBB vs last month, 2 years into building Spott. Nobody asked why we'd leave strategy consulting. Everyone questioned whether starting a company with your best friends was a good idea. Today, 5,000+ recruiters agree it was.
- Our Customer Success team grew from 1 to 6 over the summer, and is out here looking like prime Barça. 🔵🔴 Five signings in one transfer window: a former recruiter, an engineer, a change manager, a product expert and an ex-consultant. And Dimitri doing his best Pep impression. Whatever your agency asks, the answer comes from the person best placed to give it. Tiki-taka, but for your support chat. P.S. We're not up to a full starting eleven yet. Reach out to Dimitri if you're interested in joining the CS squad.
- From now on, Spott gets better every week without anyone teaching it. That's only possible because your whole desk is already in one place: every candidate, client, job and conversation, with AI built in from day one. Every time you correct Spott, it remembers. "This client doesn't like prestigious CVs." "Never poach from those companies." "Skip anyone who's changed jobs three times in two years." Say it once, never explain it twice. Then, while you sleep, Spott dreams. Agents go over those memories and connect them. Nothing to
- Spott has fairly unreasonable ambitions. So naturally, we hit it off with the guy who used to run a rocket company. Phillip Chambers co-founded Peakon, which sold to Workday for $700M. Then he became CEO of Orbex, a UK space launch company. Apparently, scaling a software company was getting a bit too straightforward. Phil is a partner at Balderton, who led our $21M Series A. We want to rebuild the software that recruitment agencies around the world run on. Having someone who's built and scaled a software company himself is a
- Congrats Spott on the $21M series A. Leuven to New York and Sydney in two years. I was skeptical at the start. ATS/CRM looked like a red ocean to me. Entrenched, incumbents, decade-old contracts, no oxygen left for a newcomer... It took you about a year to prove me I was wrong. 10x revenue sinds Januari customer across the world with significant chunks coming from US, APAC and UK. Agencies with +100 recruiters actually migrating off systems they had been stuck on for years. Solid execution! 🔥 At daidalo, we are bootstrapped and
- We raised a $21M Series A led by Balderton to build the global AI-native operating system for recruitment agencies, bringing our valuation to $100M+. 18 months ago, our product had not even launched. Today, 5,000+ recruiters use Spott every day. Spott is connecting your data and conversations, and increasingly drives the work for you. This round takes that us a step further on that journey: deeper enterprise capability, global coverage, and AI that frees up your time to focus on what truly matters: people, relationships and
- One of the nicest things customers tell us has nothing to do with placements or revenue. It’s that they got their evening back. Recruitment has always had a ridiculous amount of work around the actual work. Updating records, writing notes, moving data around, following up, preparing shortlists. None of it is particularly difficult. There’s just a lot of it. And for years, being a great recruiter often meant accepting that all of this happened after the calls, meetings and candidate conversations were done. AI is starting to eat away
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