Estel Technologies has closed a €270K pre-seed round led by Vitosha Ventures, with participation from Austrian angel investor Kerem Basak, founder and CEO of FB Consulting, to expand its AI-native sales platform for the global tech talent industry.
The tech staffing market is worth an estimated €250 billion globally, growing at 7.2% a year, but the sales process behind it hasn’t caught up. Recruiters and staffing sales teams typically juggle six or more disconnected tools to prospect and qualify leads, and up to 40% of the job listings they chase are stale, duplicated, or already filled by the time they reach them. Estel estimates the resulting waste in research time and dead-end outreach costs the industry over €60 billion globally every year.
Estel replaces that stack with a single AI-native workspace built by a team with direct experience in the problem. CEO Bogdan Stavrev previously served as VP of Digital Products at one of the world’s largest staffing organizations. CPO Ivo Michorov led Google‘s global $1B+ extended workforce program. CTO Yusuf Berki brings 15 years of building AI and machine learning systems across HR tech, healthcare, and finance.
The platform’s proprietary Demand Confidence Score (DCS) ingests market signals daily, verifies which opportunities are real, ranks them for each individual user, and automatically matches them to the buyers most likely to convert. Where most sales tools in the category solve a single piece of the pipeline, Estel is built to cover the full journey from demand verification through outreach in one workspace.
"Tech staffing hasn't had its Salesforce moment yet, everyone's still stitching together tools and guessing which leads are real and worth their time. We built Estel because sales teams should spend their time selling and not wasting half their days in research."
Customers are already seeing the impact. “We were impressed with the demand verification and lead ranking capabilities, which save us significant time in identifying real opportunities,” said Scott Zorn, VP Sales at Artech. “Estel proved to be a game changer in automating the sales and lead generation process,” said David Malkinson, MD at Maxam Digital.
Estel already shows live tech demand in the UK, DACH region, Poland and Bulgaria, with three enterprise clients and €24K in annual recurring revenue. Estel is targeting 20x growth in annual recurring revenue by mid-2027. For Kerem Basak, the investment follows firsthand use of the product. His firm, FB Consulting, was already an Estel customer before backing the round. “I used Estel before I invested in it. As someone who’s spent a decade in tech talent, I don’t say that lightly; most tools in this space overpromise. This one actually changed how my team works,” said Basak.
“We back founders who understand a market from the inside. Bogdan and Ivo aren’t guessing at what staffing sales teams need; they’ve lived the problem. That’s rare at pre-seed, and it’s why we moved fast,” said Max Gurvits, Vitosha Ventures. The fresh capital will be invested in strengthening the platform’s core technology: the proprietary demand verification, scoring, and matching algorithms, and in accelerating growth and traction across the platform’s major European markets. The pre-seed round aims to accelerate early stage traction, hit growth milestones and prepare for Seed raise and expansion into the US market in 2027.
