Orbio raises $21 million to automate frontline worker management

Frontline employers facing constant turnover are turning to software that promises to do more than sort applicants. Orbio has raised $21 million in a Series A led by Dawn Capital and says its AI agents can interview candidates, assess fit, monitor output and handle daily check-ins across the employee lifecycle.

Founded in 2025 by Sergi Bastardas with Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé, the company grew out of Bastardas’s decade at Amazon and his experience at the floriculture startup Colvin, where he said he saw a lack of efficient “human infrastructure” for managing frontline workers. Orbio says its goal is to help businesses run workforces more autonomously by feeding onboarding data, exit interviews and engagement signals back into recruiting and retention decisions.

The company’s customers already include Poke and YUM! Brands, the parent of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC. At The Stepping Stones Group, a behavioral health provider, Orbio says it now runs the company’s full U.S. operation and has increased the share of candidates who make it through to hire by 20%.

That pitch lands in sectors where labor bottlenecks are as much an operational cost as wages themselves. Healthcare, retail, logistics and hospitality employ roughly 2.7 billion people worldwide, Bastardas said, and many of those workers still move through hiring systems built around spreadsheets, phone calls and managers with too many openings to fill. Orbio’s argument is that better automation can shorten time-to-hire, reduce early attrition and make onboarding less dependent on scattered manual processes.

The company’s AI agents, named Maria, Daniel and Claire, are designed to sit inside those workflows rather than around them. Orbio’s challenge is whether that actually improves the experience for workers entering low-wage jobs, or simply shifts more HR judgment into a less visible layer of software. Bastardas said the opportunity is large enough that “this is their AI moment,” and the company is pitching itself against startups such as Paradox and WorkJam as well as the legacy frontline HR stack.

Orbio says it has now raised $26 million in total, with previous backing from Visionaries and 2100 Ventures. The new capital will go toward hiring and building more AI agents, as the startup tries to prove that automation can do more than speed paperwork and can instead reshape how frontline employers recruit, onboard and keep workers.