Samuel Smeys
| Samuel Smeys | |
| Occupation | Co-founder and CTO of Spott |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founding Spott, an AI-native ATS/CRM for recruiting firms |
| Education | B.S., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Master's degree, London School of Economics and Political Science |
Samuel Smeys is a Belgian software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Spott, an AI-native applicant tracking system (ATS) and customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed for recruiting and staffing firms. Spott participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch.[1]
Early life and education
Smeys holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. He subsequently earned a Master's degree in Statistics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where his studies focused on mathematical statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.[1]
Career
Before co-founding Spott, Smeys worked at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he built data and machine learning pipelines for recruitment agencies across the United Kingdom, United States, and European Union. His work at BCG covered a range of industry verticals, experience levels, and staffing type specialisations, giving him direct exposure to the operational challenges faced by recruiting firms.
Smeys co-founded Spott alongside Lander Degreve (CEO) and Manu Vanderveeren (COO). All three co-founders had backgrounds in management consulting — Degreve at Bain & Company and Vanderveeren at McKinsey & Company — before leaving their positions to build the company.[2]
Spott is an AI-native ATS and CRM platform built specifically for third-party recruiting and staffing firms. The company positions its product as a replacement for legacy recruitment platforms that require extensive manual work and rely on fragmented add-on tools. Spott integrates a full ATS and CRM with AI agents across the recruiting workflow, aiming to automate routine tasks and allow recruiters to focus on higher-value activities such as candidate and client relationships. The platform has attracted customers migrating from established products including Bullhorn, Jobadder, Vincere, Loxo, and Recruit CRM.
In May 2025, Spott announced it had raised $3.2 million in seed funding to further develop its platform. The company is headquartered in Leuven, Belgium, and also maintains a presence in the United States, with job listings indicating operations in New York. As of available information, the company has approximately 20 employees.
As CTO, Smeys oversees the technical architecture of the platform, with a focus on backend engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Spott – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Spott". 'Spott}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.