Orbio raises $21 million to automate frontline hiring and onboarding

Orbio has raised $21 million in a Series A round led by Dawn Capital, betting that one of enterprise software’s oldest pain points, hiring and onboarding frontline workers, can finally be automated at scale. The Madrid-based startup is pitching a system built for large workforces, with AI agents that handle job posting, candidate outreach, applicant tracking, interviewing, onboarding and retention insights across multiple communication channels and more than 60 languages.

The funding lands in a market Dawn Capital says has been overlooked despite the rush into workplace AI. In the firm’s view, the boom has given white-collar employees copilots while leaving the hiring and management of frontline staff largely manual. Dawn Capital puts the opportunity in stark terms: about 2.7 billion people worldwide work in frontline roles across healthcare, retail, logistics, hospitality and related sectors, and previous workplace apps have built viable businesses without solving the core hiring and onboarding bottleneck.

Orbio was founded in 2025 by Sergi Bastardas with co-founders Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé. Bastardas spent about a decade at Amazon before working at floriculture startup Colvin, a background that fits the company’s focus on high-volume operations and distributed labor. Orbio says its platform acts as an AI-powered HR team for enterprises and large workforces, and the company has named its agents Maria, Daniel and Claire.

The startup is already working with customers that point to its intended market. Its client list includes Poke and YUM! Brands, the parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC, which use the platform to recruit, onboard and manage frontline employees. Orbio says the system can run across several channels at once and claims the agents work “400x faster,” a promise that will now be tested against the realities of turnover, shift-based staffing and uneven training across large organizations.

For employers, the appeal is obvious: faster time-to-hire, less manual coordination and more consistent onboarding. The harder question is whether automation can reduce friction without simply moving risk downstream to workers who already face high churn and thin support. Orbio’s raise suggests investors believe the answer could be yes, but the real measure will be whether the software improves retention and match quality in the sectors where staffing failures are most costly.