Spanish HR tech startup ORBIO raises €18 million: is the AI agent becoming the new frontline manager?

For nearly twenty years, the enterprise software industry concentrated its efforts on office workers. ERPs structured operations, CRMs transformed sales teams, collaborative tools digitised communication and HR suites streamlined workforce administration. Yet a large proportion of the global workforce remained excluded from this revolution: retail employees, restaurant workers, logistics operators, security guards, healthcare staff and call-centre agents.

It is in this market that Orbio has raised €18 million from Dawn Capital. Founded in Spain in 2025 by Sergi Bastardas, Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé, the startup is developing an AI agent platform designed to automate the recruitment, onboarding, management and retention of frontline workers. The company already claims deployments with international groups including Adecco, Yum Brands, AWWG, Atento and Poke House, and plans to accelerate its expansion in France.

Beyond the funding round itself, the transaction reveals the emergence of a new market: agents capable of taking over a growing share of the functions traditionally performed by frontline managers and HR teams.

The workers left behind by the SaaS revolution

One of the most striking statistics cited by Orbio concerns the structure of the global labour market itself. According to the company, nearly 80% of the workforce occupies frontline roles. That represents approximately 2.7 billion people working across retail, hospitality, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and services.

Unlike office employees, these workers rarely have a professional email address or daily access to business applications. Their relationship with their employer still relies heavily on phone calls, text messages, WhatsApp and fragmented administrative processes. In many organisations, a significant proportion of recruitment and workforce management still depends on Excel spreadsheets, manual calls and repetitive tasks performed by operational teams.

This creates a paradox: the workers responsible for an essential share of global economic activity are also among the last to benefit from the productivity gains created by digital transformation.

For investors, this situation now represents a considerable opportunity. While the CRM and collaboration-software markets are largely consolidated, the operational management of frontline workers remains fragmented.

More a workforce-management problem than a recruitment problem

For founder Sergi Bastardas, the underlying issue is not a structural talent shortage but the poor allocation of available resources.

Across many sectors, companies face annual turnover rates that can exceed 50% or even 70%. Every unfilled position can have an immediate operational impact: a restaurant reduces its seating capacity, a store operates with incomplete teams, a logistics centre slows down or a call centre takes longer to process enquiries.

The cost of these disruptions extends far beyond recruitment. It directly affects revenue, service quality and operational performance.

This is precisely the equation Orbio is seeking to solve. The company is not positioning itself simply as a candidate-acquisition tool, but as a platform designed to manage the entire employee lifecycle.

From HR copilot to operational agent

Most early applications of artificial intelligence in human resources were designed to assist recruiters. Models could write job advertisements, screen résumés or improve the matching of candidates with open positions.

Orbio’s agents are designed to interact directly with employees and candidates.

They can initiate contact, conduct an initial interview, collect the required administrative information, guide a new employee through onboarding, monitor engagement over time and detect signs of disengagement that may indicate an impending departure.

The software is no longer merely a tool used by a recruiter. It becomes an operational participant in its own right, capable of carrying out certain tasks without human intervention.

This development forms part of a broader trend across the artificial intelligence market. After assistants and copilots, software companies are now seeking to build systems capable of operating autonomously across complete business processes.

A new software category is emerging

Most major enterprise software markets are relatively well defined. Companies use ERPs to manage their resources, CRMs to oversee sales and HCM platforms to administer their workforces.

The established players remain dominant. Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM, UKG and Dayforce still form the backbone of the HR systems used by many large companies. But these platforms were designed primarily to structure information and automate administrative processes. They were never intended to communicate directly with millions of frontline workers.

Orbio is seeking to occupy a different layer by becoming the operational interface capable of interacting with workers every day. This approach could foreshadow the emergence of a new category that might be described as “agentic workforce management”. In this model, software no longer simply organises work. It participates directly in its execution.

Competition extending far beyond human resources

Although Orbio operates within the human-resources market, its potential competitors extend well beyond HR software providers.

The first category includes platforms specialising in recruitment and talent acquisition. Companies such as Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, Lever and iCIMS have spent years seeking to optimise corporate recruitment processes.

A second category consists of companies specialising in artificial intelligence for HR, including Paradox, HireVue, Eightfold AI, Mercor and Moonhub. They too are developing tools capable of automating some interactions with candidates.

The most significant threat, however, could come from players even further removed from the sector. As language models become more capable and agent platforms become more widely accessible, major AI infrastructure providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google could enable companies to create their own HR agents directly.

Why major employers are already adopting this approach

Orbio’s first customers provide an indication of the organisations most likely to benefit rapidly from these technologies.

Adecco, Yum Brands, AWWG, Atento and Poke House share several characteristics: large workforces, operations spread across multiple countries and languages, and continuous recruitment requirements.

In such environments, even a modest improvement in hiring times or employee retention can generate significant gains.

The results reported by Orbio point in this direction. The company claims that some customers have reduced their time to hire by more than 60%, while generating substantial productivity gains for HR and operational teams.

Although these figures will need to be confirmed at greater scale, they illustrate the growing interest among large companies in workforce-management models built around autonomous agents.

France could become a leading testing ground

The French market combines several characteristics that favour the adoption of such solutions: persistent labour shortages in certain service occupations, the significant role of temporary employment, administrative complexity and the high cost of workforce management.

For many companies, reducing the interval between an application and an employee’s first day by several days represents a tangible competitive advantage.

France could therefore become one of Europe’s most interesting testing grounds for the spread of these new human-resources management models.

The real issue: how far can management be automated?

Recruiting, onboarding and informing an employee are relatively structured processes that lend themselves well to automation. Management, however, also depends on dimensions that are far more difficult to model: trust, authority, conflict resolution, individual support and the construction of a corporate culture.

The future of these platforms will therefore depend less on their ability to replace recruiters than on their capacity to find the right place within the relationship between companies and their employees.