Orbio Secures $21 Million Funding to Revolutionize Hiring and Onboarding for Frontline Employees
After spending ten years at Amazon and with the floriculture startup Colvin, Sergi Bastardas recognized a notable gap: the lack of effective “human infrastructure” to support behind-the-scenes workers. In 2025, he teamed up with co-founders Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé to establish Orbio, a startup aimed at helping businesses manage their frontline workforce with the aid of AI technology.
On Monday, Orbio revealed it had secured $21 million in a Series A funding round led by Dawn Capital. The company boasts several clients, including Poke and YUM! Brands, which encompasses Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC, utilizing Orbio to onboard and oversee their frontline staff. Bastardas noted that users have progressed from pilot programs to fully implementing the software. For instance, The Stepping Stones Group, a behavioral health provider, now oversees its entire U.S. operations through Orbio, which has improved hiring success rates by 20%.
Orbio’s AI agents, named Maria, Daniel, and Claire, are designed to interview applicants, evaluate their suitability, track employee performance, and conduct daily check-ins throughout their employment journey. Bastardas emphasized that the goal is to enable businesses to manage their workforce autonomously while simultaneously engaging and supporting frontline employees via AI systems.
“Each agent produces data that interconnects with the others: insights from onboarding enhance recruitment quality, exit interviews provide reasons for employee departures, refining hiring criteria, and engagement metrics help identify risks to retention,” he explained.
Orbio finds itself in competition with several startups, including Paradox, which focuses on automating recruitment, and WorkJam, which aids in managing frontline workers. However, Bastardas sees Orbio’s primary challenge as the traditional methods used to oversee frontline staff, particularly in sectors like healthcare, retail, and logistics, where the processes can often be disjointed and still rely on outdated tools like spreadsheets and phone calls. With the rapid advancement of AI, he believes significant changes are underway. Orbio has raised a total of $26 million in funding from various investors, including Visionaries and 2100 Ventures, and Bastardas stated that the new funds will be allocated toward hiring and developing additional AI agents.
“This will bring about a transformation for both businesses and their workforce,” Bastardas asserted. “The 2.7 billion individuals who sustain healthcare, retail, logistics, and hospitality, many of whom lack corporate email addresses, have largely been overlooked until now. This is their moment with AI.”
