After Sergi Bastardas’ decade at Amazon and at floriculture startup Colvin, one thing always stood out—the sense that there wasn’t enough effective “human infrastructure” to manage the workers behind the scenes. He felt this feeling and, in 2025, together with his co-founders Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé, launched Orbioa business startup that helps businesses manage frontline workers — using AI agents, of course.
On Monday, the company announced a $21 million series in 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), to onboard and manage their frontline employees. Bastardas said customers are moving from piloting Orbio to full deployment of the software. As an example, he said that at behavioral health provider The Stepping Stones Group, Orbio now manages the company’s full US operation, with 20% more candidates getting hired
Orbio agents (Maria, Daniel and Claire) can interview candidates, assess their suitability, monitor employee performance and perform day-to-day audits throughout an employee’s work life cycle. The goal is to help businesses operate their workforce autonomously, Bastardas said, adding that businesses will be able to engage and support the frontline workforce while also outsourcing some workforce functions to AI agents.
“Each agent produces data that feeds back to the others: onboarding signals inform quality of hire; exit interviews reveal why employees leave, which recalibrates hiring criteria; engagement data identifies retention risks,” he continued.
Orbio competes with several startups — like Paradox, which helps automate recruiting, and WorkJam, which helps manage frontline workers.
Bastardas sees Orbio’s biggest competitor as its legacy approach, however, to how it manages frontline workers (especially in industries like healthcare, retail and logistics) — a fragmented process that sometimes still involves spreadsheets and phone calls. All this is rapidly changing, however, in the age of artificial intelligence. Orbio has raised $26 million in funding to date from investors including Visionaries and 2100 Ventures. Bastardas said the new capital will be used to hire and develop more AI agents.
“That will be it [a] transformation for business, but also the workforce,” Bastardas said. “The 2.7 billion people who keep healthcare, retail, logistics and hospitality running, most of whom don’t have a business email address, used to have nothing. This is their AI moment.”
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