Spott

What it is

Spott is an ATS and recruiting CRM in one workspace, built only for external recruitment agencies — perm, executive search, contract and temp — and explicitly not for in-house HR teams. It was founded in Leuven, Belgium in 2024, went through Y Combinator (W25), launched its core platform in late 2025, and on 22 September 2026 announced a $21M Series A led by Balderton Capital with Base10, Y Combinator and Fortino participating (tech.eu, The Next Web). That brings total funding to $24.2M. The company reports 500+ agencies on the platform and revenue up more than tenfold since the start of 2026.

The pitch is that the system fills itself in. Calls, emails, WhatsApp threads and CVs are captured, transcribed and attached to the right candidate or client record, and the AI then works from that record: ranking candidates against a job, drafting outreach and submittals, suggesting the next task. The product it is trying to displace is Bullhorn; its own stated ideal customer is a 20+ user agency in the UK or Belgium migrating off Bullhorn, Loxo, Vincere or JobAdder.

Why it shows up in agency stacks

• Matching is two-stage and explainable. Hard filters narrow the pool first, then a vector model ranks what remains against written criteria, and recruiters can search in plain language across notes, attachments and call transcripts rather than CV keywords alone. That last part is the actual differentiator: a database where five years of call notes are searchable is worth more than a better parser.
• AI usage is in the seat price. The pricing page states that token spend for matching, note-taking, outreach drafting and recommendations is included on every plan; the only metered extra is enrichment credits for contact data. Compare Loxo, where agents, outreach and AI Chat all draw down a monthly credit pool with no rollover.
• An official MCP server and an open REST API. Spott lists first-party connectors for Claude and ChatGPT through its own MCP, plus API documentation at api-docs.spott.io. A recruiter can query the agency database from Claude without a middleware layer.
• Communications are native, not bolted on. WhatsApp (including bulk templated sends over the Business API), Aircall, Ringover, RingCentral, Dialpad and Zoom all sync into one timeline per record. For European desks where candidates live on WhatsApp, that one integration often decides the evaluation.

Pricing reality

Published at spott.io/pricing as of 3 October 2026, per user per month:

• Core — $119 billed annually ($149 monthly). ATS/CRM, AI notetaker, AI search and matching, a single inbox across email, SMS and WhatsApp, CV reformatter and shortlists.
• Pro — $179 billed annually ($219 monthly). Adds automations, the marketing suite, multi-channel sequences and data enrichment.
• Enterprise — book a demo. Adds custom T&Cs and DPA, advanced roles and permissions, multi-office management and a named point of contact. Treat it as quote-only.

The annual figures sit under a struck-through $139 and $199, so they read as current offers rather than settled list prices — get the renewal rate in the contract. Enrichment credits are extra and unpriced on the page.

At list, ten Pro seats on annual billing is $21,480 a year; ten Core seats is $14,280. Ten Loxo Professional seats is $23,880, and ten Bullhorn seats run $34,000-$46,100 in year one per the third-party TCO trackers cited in our Bullhorn entry. Spott also sells month-to-month, at roughly 22-25% above the annual rate; Loxo is annual prepay only.

Best for

Agency owners and ops leads at perm, search and contract agencies of roughly 10-200 seats, in Europe, the UK or Australia, who are leaving Bullhorn, Vincere or JobAdder because nobody fills in the CRM — and who want call capture and matching to do it for them. The vendor says enterprise customers run 200+ seats.

Not for corporate TA. If you hire into your own company, Greenhouse or Ashby fit the requisition-and-interview workflow; Spott’s model of clients, submittals and placements will fight you.

Versus the alternatives

• Bullhorn is the installed-base leader and still the pick for large temp operations that need pay-and-bill, VMS connectivity and a 350+ partner marketplace. Pick Spott when the problem is adoption and data quality rather than back-office coverage.
• Loxo is the other AI-native pole. Pick Loxo when the bottleneck is finding people you don’t already have — its 850M+ profile graph is in the seat. Pick Spott when the value is locked in your own database and call history.
• Recruit CRM is the price floor at $95 annual, with timesheets in-product. Pick it for a sub-10-seat contract desk on a tight budget.
• Recruiterflow competes with Spott as a fast-growing challenger and wins for outbound-heavy US boutiques at a flat $149.

Watch-outs

• The vendor is under two years old. The core platform shipped in late 2025 and the review base is thin — 11 reviews on G2 and 2 on Capterra as of this check. Guard: insist on a reference call with an agency of your size that migrated from your current system, and write a full-data export (records, notes, transcripts, attachments) into the contract.
• Back office runs through partners. Pay-and-bill isn’t native; Spott syncs invoices to Xero on placement and connects to Timesheet Portal. Guard: temp and contract desks should scope the timesheet and invoicing flow end to end before signing, not during migration.
• The four-week migration is a vendor claim. Spott markets roughly 4 weeks against 16+ for incumbents. Guard: run a test migration on a 10% sample of your database and check that notes and attachments land on the right records before committing the cutover date.
• Data residency defaults to the EU, and OpenAI is a listed subprocessor. Guard: US and APAC agencies with client contractual data-location terms should confirm the region option and the subprocessor list in the DPA — a custom DPA is an Enterprise feature.
• Enrichment is the open line item. Guard: get the enrichment-credit price in writing and size it on the share of your database missing emails or phone numbers, not on a demo estimate.