For nearly two decades, the enterprise software industry has focused its efforts on office workers. ERPs have structured operations, CRMs have transformed sales teams, collaborative tools have digitized exchanges and HR suites have streamlined workforce administration. However, a large part of the world’s working population has remained on the sidelines of this revolution: store employees, catering team members, logistics operators, security agents, health personnel and even call centers.
It is on this ground that Orbio has just raised 18 million euros from Dawn Capital. The Spanish startup, founded in 2025 by Sergi Bastardas, Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé, is developing an AI agent platform intended to automate the recruitment, onboarding, management and retention of field workers. The company already boasts deployments with international groups such as Adecco, Yum Brands, AWWG, Atento and Poke House and plans to accelerate its expansion in France.
Beyond the lifting itself, the operation reveals the emergence of a new market, that of agents capable of assuming an increasing part of the functions traditionally carried out by local managers and HR teams.
The forgotten people of the SaaS revolution
One of the most interesting statistics put forward by Orbio concerns the very structure of the global labor market. According to the company, nearly 80% of assets occupy field functions, this represents around 2.7 billion people working in commerce, catering, logistics, industry, health and even services.
Unlike office workers, these workers rarely have a work email address or daily access to business applications. The relationship with the employer still largely involves telephone, SMS, WhatsApp or fragmented administrative processes. In many organizations, a significant portion of recruiting and workforce management still relies on Excel sheets, manual calls, and repetitive tasks performed by operational teams.
This situation creates a paradox, the populations which generate an essential part of global economic activity are also those who have benefited the latest from the productivity gains resulting from digital transformation.
For investors, this situation now represents a considerable opportunity. Where the CRM or collaborative software markets are largely consolidated, the operational management of field workers still remains fragmented.
A workforce management problem more than a recruitment problem
For its founder Sergi Bastardas, the problem is not a structural shortage of talent but a poor allocation of available resources.
In many industries, companies face turnover rates sometimes exceeding 50% or 70% per year. Each unfilled position can have immediate consequences on the activity: a restaurant reduces its reception capacities, a store operates with incomplete teams, a logistics center slows down its operations or a call center lengthens its processing times.
The cost of these dysfunctions goes far beyond the simple question of recruitment. It directly affects turnover, quality of service and operational performance.
It is precisely this equation that Orbio seeks to solve. The company is not positioning itself as a simple candidate acquisition tool but as a platform intended to manage the entire employee life cycle.
From HR co-pilot to operational agent
Most early applications of artificial intelligence in human resources were aimed at assisting recruiters. The models made it possible to write job offers, filter CVs or improve the matching between candidates and positions.
Orbio agents are designed to act directly with employees and candidates.
They can initiate contact, conduct a first interview, collect the necessary administrative information, guide the integration of a new employee, monitor their commitment over time or detect signals of disengagement likely to announce a departure.
The software is no longer simply a tool used by a recruiter and itself becomes an operational actor capable of carrying out certain tasks without human intervention.
This development is part of a broader trend observed across the entire artificial intelligence market. After assistants and co-pilots, publishers are now seeking to build systems capable of operating autonomously on complete business processes.
A new software category is emerging
Most large enterprise software markets are relatively well identified. Companies use ERPs to manage their resources, CRMs to manage their sales and HCM platforms to manage their workforce.
The historical players in this market remain dominant. Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM, UKG or Dayforce still constitute the backbone of the HR systems of many large companies, but these platforms were designed above all to structure information and automate administrative processes. They were never designed to communicate directly with millions of field employees.
Orbio seeks to occupy a different layer and become the operational interface capable of interacting with workers on a daily basis. This approach could foreshadow the appearance of a new category that could be described as “Agentic Workforce Management”. In this model, the software no longer just organizes the work. He participates directly in its execution.
Competition that goes far beyond human resources
If Orbio operates in the world of human resources, its potential competitors are much more numerous than just HR publishers.
A first category brings together platforms specializing in recruitment and talent acquisition. Players like Greenhouse, SmartRecruiters, Lever and iCIMS have been seeking to optimize company recruitment processes for several years.
A second category brings together specialists in artificial intelligence applied to HR, including Paradox, HireVue, Eightfold AI, Mercor and Moonhub. They too are developing tools capable of automating part of the interactions with candidates.
But the biggest threat could come from players even further removed from the sector. As language models become more efficient and agent platforms become more popular, large AI infrastructure providers like OpenAI, Anthropic or Google could make it possible to create HR agents directly by companies themselves.
Why large employers are already taking this approach
The company’s first customers offer insight into the type of organizations likely to benefit most quickly from these technologies.
Adecco, Yum Brands, AWWG, Atento and Poke House share several characteristics: large workforces, operations spread across several countries, several languages and permanent recruitment needs.
In these environments, even the slightest improvement in time-to-hire or retention can yield significant gains.
The results put forward by Orbio point in this direction, the company mentions in particular a reduction of more than 60% in the recruitment time for certain clients as well as significant productivity gains for HR and operational teams.
Although these figures will need to be confirmed on a larger scale, they illustrate the growing interest of large companies in workforce management models based on autonomous agents.
France could become a privileged testing ground
The French market combines several characteristics favorable to the adoption of this type of solution: persistent tensions in certain service professions, significant weight of temporary work, administrative complexity and high costs linked to workforce management.
For many companies, the ability to reduce the time between an application and a position by several days represents a tangible competitive advantage.
France could thus constitute one of the most interesting European laboratories for observing the diffusion of these new models of human resources management.
The real issue: to what extent can we automate management?
Recruiting, integrating or informing an employee are relatively structured processes that lend themselves well to automation. Management, on the other hand, is also based on dimensions that are much more difficult to model: trust, authority, conflict resolution, individual support or even the construction of a corporate culture.
The future of these platforms will therefore depend less on their ability to replace recruiters than on their ability to find their place in the relationship between the company and its employees.
