The AI boom has given white-collar workers copilots. It’s done nothing for the 2.7 billion frontline workers who keep the real-world economy running – healthcare, retail, logistics, hospitality and much else besides. The work of hiring, onboarding and managing them remains stubbornly manual.

A previous wave of workplace apps built decent businesses for this market over the last decade. With hindsight the limit was that they were giving frontline workers an app. The actual work of running a frontline operation – sourcing 500 candidates for next week’s shift, screening them, onboarding the ones who pass, chasing the ones who go quiet – still ran on humans, spreadsheets and phone calls. And demand keeps rising: reindustrialisation and the infrastructure build-out are pulling frontline roles into the economy faster than the labour pool can fill them. The cost is enormous: annual churn above 70% in many sectors, recruiter teams buried in admin, and the biggest three staffing agencies that absorb the overflow jointly turning over $70bn at sub-20% gross margin. Most of that revenue is people coordinating other people.

The previous wave couldn’t do anything about it because language was hard, voice was harder, and orchestrating context across channels at frontline scale was nearly impossible. That’s all changed in the last 18 months. Voice quality across any language is now good enough that candidates don’t mind talking to AI (some even prefer it). The channels that frontline workers actually use – voice, SMS, WhatsApp – are finally addressable, and the candidate experience now fits around them rather than the employer. Orbio is the end-to-end product built on that shift: agents that run the hiring and retention lifecycle themselves, rather than giving a recruiter a smarter tool to do it.

During his time at Amazon and Colvin, Sergi Bastardas experienced first-hand the challenges of managing a frontline workforce. Nacho Travesí led sales at Cobee, the pioneer in workplace benefits, through to exit in 2024. Antonio Melé co-founded Nucoro, acquired by Backbase in 2023. Between them, an operator who has run frontline workforces at scale, a commercial leader who sold into them, and a technical founder with an exit behind him – each having watched the previous generation of frontline tools fall short of the actual problem.

As investors, what got us fully convinced was customer behaviour after deployment. At a transport operator the recruiting team has fallen from 22 FTEs to 15. At a global restaurant chain natural attrition in recruiting isn’t being backfilled. At an enterprise security customer, a $300k talent call centre is gone, and time-to-hire has fallen from more than 3 weeks to a matter of days.

What’s unusual here is the permanent operational changes that early customers are making centred around Orbio; it’s hard to imagine anyone going back to the old way of doing things. And in one customer, churn is down 20% after Orbio used its data to rewrite the screening criteria – surfacing factors that no human had noticed. That loop is based on trust: the more of the operation a customer hands to Orbio, the better it gets at the parts humans were guessing at.

Coordinating frontline labour is a sub-20% margin business when people do it – that’s what the staffing agencies are. Done by software, it’s a different beast. Orbio captures value against the wage bill it removes, not a software budget – yet achieves software margins.

A vertical agent company needs three things to be worth backing: an operation hard enough to own end to end, founders with deep domain knowledge, and an advantage that compounds the longer it runs. Orbio has all three.