Ringtime Secures €1.8M to Advance AI Voice Agents
▼ Summary
– Ringtime is an AI startup that automates inbound and outbound recruitment conversations, handling screening and matching without human recruiters.
– The company has raised a €1.8 million seed round to expand its team, marketing, and features specifically for blue-collar hiring.
– Its product targets a labor market segment often ignored by traditional HR software, such as workers in logistics and retail who require fast communication.
– Beyond recruitment, Ringtime is already being used in real estate with ERA Belgium to automate property viewing scheduling.
– The company plans to use its funding to expand into new European markets, aiming to solve communication infrastructure problems in high-volume, time-sensitive sectors.
For recruiters in fast-moving industries, the race to secure talent often feels like a losing battle. Hours vanish into repetitive phone calls, unanswered voicemails, and screening conversations that yield few results. Ringtime, a Ghent-based AI startup, is tackling this communication bottleneck head-on with voice agents that automate the entire recruitment conversation. The company has just secured €1.8 million in seed funding to advance its mission, with the capital earmarked for team growth, marketing, and new feature development focused on blue-collar hiring.
The funding round was led by Volta Ventures, with participation from Syndicate One, JK Invest, New School VC, and Allusion. Ringtime’s solution is designed for a segment largely overlooked by traditional HR software: workers in logistics, retail, food processing, and construction. These candidates often don’t use email or LinkedIn, switch jobs frequently, and expect immediate responses, a pace most recruitment processes cannot match.
The core product is an AI agent that manages both inbound and outbound recruitment dialogues from start to finish. It identifies a candidate’s preferred communication channel and language, supporting 22 in total, and initiates contact at the optimal time. The system then conducts conversations, performs screenings, and facilitates matches without requiring a human recruiter on the call. This approach directly addresses what CEO Vincent Theeten describes as a fundamental infrastructure problem, not merely a matching issue. “Existing hiring tools are built for people with one job at one employer,” Theeten noted. “Reaching a mobile technical workforce is one of the biggest challenges recruiters face.”
Theeten, previously founder of the equipment management platform Cheqroom, co-founded Ringtime in September 2025 alongside Johan Krijgsman, Michiel Vanhaverbeke, and Diederik Syoen. Krijgsman’s involvement has already opened doors beyond recruitment; through his role leading ERA Belgium, Ringtime is being used to automate property viewings, allowing potential buyers to schedule visits autonomously outside standard hours. This demonstrates the company’s broader ambition to apply its orchestration layer to any sector plagued by high contact volumes and severe time pressure.
Currently, Ringtime reports annual recurring revenue of €400,000, with clients including staffing firms Trixxo Jobs, Synergie Jobs, and House of HR. The company aims to build what co-founder Diederik Syoen calls “the infrastructure that brings supply and demand together faster than the market can do on its own.” With Europe facing persistent structural labour shortages in key blue-collar sectors, the need for such a solution is acute. The fresh capital will fuel expansion into the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany, testing whether an AI-native communication layer can bring transformative efficiency to physical-world hiring, much as software has done for office-based roles.
(Source: The Next Web)