After Sergi Bastardas spent a decade at Amazon and the floristry startup Colvin, one thing always stood out—the sense that there wasn’t an efficient enough “people infrastructure” to manage workers behind the scenes. He embraced this sentiment and in 2025, along with co-founders Nacho Travesí and Antonio Mele Launched Orbioan enterprise startup that helps businesses manage frontline workers, of course, using artificial intelligence agents.
On Monday, the company announced a $21 million Series A round led by Dawn Capital. The startup says its customers already include Poke and YUM! Brands (owners of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC), manage and manage their frontline staff. Bastardas said customers have progressed from using Orbio as a pilot to fully deploying the software. As an example, he said at behavioral health provider The Stepping Stones Group, Orbio now powers all of the company’s U.S. operations, and 20% more candidates are being passed on for hires.
Orbio agents (Maria, Daniel and Claire) can interview candidates, assess suitability, monitor employee productivity and conduct daily checks during the employee’s work cycle. The goal is to help businesses manage their workforces autonomously, Bastardas said, allowing businesses to engage and support frontline workforces while also outsourcing some workforce operations to AI agents.
“Each agent generates information that feeds back to the others: recruitment signals report hiring quality; exit interviews reveal why employees leave and recalibrate those hiring criteria; engagement data identifies retention risks,” he said.
Orbio competes with several startups — such as Paradox, which helps automate recruiting, and WorkJam, which helps manage frontline workers.
Bastardas sees Orbio’s biggest competitor as a legacy approach, but how front-line workers are managed (especially in areas like healthcare, retail and logistics) is a fragmented process that sometimes still involves spreadsheets and phone calls. All this is rapidly changing in the age of artificial intelligence. Orbio has raised $26 million to date from investors including Visionaries and 2100 Ventures. Bastardas said the new capital will be used to hire and develop more AI agents.
“It’s going to be transformational for (a) businesses but also for the workforce,” Bastardas said. “The 2.7 billion people who run healthcare, retail, logistics and hospitality, most of whom don’t have a corporate email address, have nothing before. This is their AI moment.”
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