After Sergi Bastardas’ decade at Amazon and floriculture startup Colvin, one thing always stood out — the feeling that there wasn’t enough efficient “human infrastructure” to manage the workers behind the scenes. He took this feeling and, in 2025, alongside his co-founders Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé, launched Orbio, an enterprise startup that helps businesses manage frontline workers — using AI agents, of course.
On Monday, the company announced a $21 million Series A 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 progressing from using Orbio in pilot to now fully deploying the software. As an example, he said that at behavioral health provider The Stepping Stones Group, Orbio now runs the company’s full US operation, with 20% more candidates making it through to get hired
The Orbio agents (Maria, Daniel, and Claire) can interview candidates, assess fit, monitor employee output, and conduct daily check-ins throughout an employee’s work lifecycle. The goal is to help businesses run their workforces autonomously, Bastardas said, adding that businesses will be able to engage and support the frontline workforces while also delegating some workforce operations to AI agents.
“Each agent generates data that feeds back into the others: onboarding signals inform recruiting quality; exit interviews reveal why employees leave, which recalibrates hiring criteria; engagement data identifies retention risks,” he continued.
Orbio competes with several startups — such as Paradox, which helps automate recruiting, and WorkJam, which helps manage frontline employees.
Bastardas considers Orbio’s biggest competitor to be the legacy approach, however, to how frontline workers are managed (especially in industries like healthcare, retail, and logistics) — a fragmented process that sometimes still involves spreadsheets and phone calls. All of this is changing rapidly, however, in the age of AI. Orbio has raised $26 million in funding to date from investors, including Visionaries and 2100 Ventures. Bastardas said the fresh capital will be used to hire and develop more AI agents.
“This will be [a] transformation for businesses, 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 corporate email address, have previously got nothing. This is their AI moment.”
