Orbio

What it is

Orbio is a set of AI agents that recruit, onboard and follow up with frontline staff over WhatsApp, SMS and phone calls. The worker never needs a login or a corporate email. Three agents cover the lifecycle. María recruits: she writes the job post, answers applicants, runs the screening interview and books the next step. Daniel runs onboarding. Claire handles check-ins and retention, and flags workers who look likely to quit. All three share one data layer, so signals from the screening conversation feed later retention scoring, and churn data feeds back into selection criteria. The platform also includes a basic applicant tracking system with career pages and source tracking, so a team without an ATS can run hiring end to end.

The company is based in Madrid and was founded in mid-2025 by Sergi Bastardas (CEO, ten years at Amazon), Nacho Travesí (co-founder of Cobee, sold to Pluxee) and Antonio Melé (co-founder of Nucoro, sold to Backbase). It raised a €6.4M seed led by Visionaries Club in September 2025, then a $21M Series A led by Dawn Capital, announced on 15 June 2026. TechCrunch puts total funding at about $26M. At the Series A, Orbio said it had run more than 2 million candidate interviews, signed 100+ clients and reached 15 markets in under a year. Named customers include YUM! Brands properties (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut), Poke House, Adecco, Atento, AWWG and The Stepping Stones Group.

Why it shows up in Recruiting stacks

Hourly hiring is lost on speed. An applicant who applies at 11pm and hears nothing until a store manager checks email on Thursday has already taken another shift. Orbio’s answer is to put the entire conversation in the applicant’s messaging app, in their language (it claims 60+), around the clock. The one published outcome is from a US behavioral-health employer: interview booking rose from 65% to 85% and no-shows roughly halved. The customer reported those numbers and nobody has independently verified them.

The second reason is the lifecycle scope. Paradox and Fountain stop at the hire or hand off at onboarding paperwork. Orbio keeps talking to the worker after day one, which matters when 90-day attrition, not time-to-hire, is the expensive number. Listed integrations cover Workday, BambooHR, Lever, Teamtailor, Bullhorn, Salesforce, and the Spanish HR suites Meta4 and Bizneo. Orbio publishes no public API documentation, so assume integrations are built per customer.

Pricing reality

Orbio publishes no prices and has no pricing page. Every deal goes through its sales team, and we found no credible third-party figure. For a reference point, ooligo’s own pages put small Paradox deployments at about $1,000 to $2,000 a month plus $15K to $35K of implementation, and Fountain’s entry point near $10,000 a year with per-hire rates of $50 to $150. Expect Orbio to quote in that range and to price on hires or active workers, not manager seats. That is the right unit for a franchise with 40 locations and one HR person.

Ask for two quotes: María alone, and María plus Daniel plus Claire. The difference is what the retention layer costs, and you can check it against what a 90-day quit costs you in rehiring and training.

Best for

A TA or people-ops lead at a multi-site employer in QSR, retail, hospitality, staffing or care hiring hundreds of hourly workers a month across several countries or languages. That is especially true where managers run hiring from their phones and 90-day attrition is the problem nobody owns. The European footprint (EU-hosted inference, Spanish HR-suite connectors) makes it a strong fit for EU and LATAM operators that US-built tools serve less well.

Skip it if you hire salaried or desk roles, fewer than about 30 people a month, or only in the US on Workday, where Paradox is now the first-party choice.

Versus the alternatives

Paradox leads the segment and is now part of Workday. Pick it if Workday is your HCM or you need Fortune 500 references and scheduling depth across thousands of US sites.

Fountain is the other share leader in high-volume hourly hiring. Pick it when a central TA team runs per-location pipelines at brand level and wants a mature ATS rather than an agent layer.

Workstream is the pick for US franchise operators who want hiring, payroll and scheduling from one vendor.

Alex (Apriora) is the fastest-growing AI interviewer and also runs screens over phone and WhatsApp. Pick it if you only need the first-round interview and already have onboarding covered. For engagement alone, without hiring, WorkJam is the incumbent in frontline employee management.

If none fit, fix response time first. A WhatsApp Business number, one templated reply within the hour and self-serve interview slots recover much of the drop-off without any AI.

Watch-outs

• Worker profiling starts at the first message. Claire’s retention scoring draws on screening-conversation signals such as response latency and availability. Tech Times reported in June 2026 that Orbio has no public process for workers to see, challenge or delete that profile, and no public bias audit. Guard: get the list of scoring features in writing, turn off any signal you cannot defend in a discrimination claim, and require a data-subject access and deletion process before go-live. In New York City, run the NYC Local Law 144 bias audit before using María’s scores to screen out candidates.
• Hiring AI is high-risk under the EU AI Act. Orbio says it is “ready for the EU AI Act” and that critical decisions require human validation, but the employer still carries deployer duties. Guard: keep a human decision on every rejection, log it, tell candidates they are talking to an AI, and review the EU AI Act deployer checklist with counsel.
• Young vendor, thin evidence. The company is barely a year old, about 20 people at the Series A, with no G2 or Capterra review base. Guard: run a paid pilot in 3 to 5 locations with booking rate, no-show rate and 90-day retention as written success metrics, and cap the first term at 12 months with data export on exit.
• WhatsApp is a personal channel. Candidates may not expect an employer to assess them in the same app they use for family chats. Guard: state in the first message that an AI assistant is running the conversation and that it is recorded, and offer a human contact. See candidate experience.