Milan-based Cato raises €6 million to help companies find and win public tenders with AI

Cato, a Milan-based AI platform that helps companies find, analyse and win public tenders, has raised a €6 million Seed round led by Keen Venture Partners.

The round, led by the Amsterdam- and London-based early-stage venture firm, also saw a group of existing investors return for the new round, including Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture. They were joined by a fresh cohort of angel investors, including the founders of Lexroom, Sibill, and Pillar.

“In this first phase we have already managed thousands of tenders. Our greatest satisfaction is hearing from our clients that they see our technology as a true ally: it helps them find the most suitable public tenders, understand the requirements and prepare their bid, increasing their chances of winning and growing,” said Andrea Zorzetto, CEO and co-founder of Cato.

“We are delighted that this value is also being recognised by an international investor like Keen Venture Partners, alongside the VCs who believed in us from the start,” he added.

The Seed round comes just months after the company had raised a €1.6 million pre-Seed led by Italian Founders Fund.

Founded in 2025 by Zorzetto and Matteo Bossolini, Cato is Italy’s first AI-native platform targeting the public sector, specifically public procurement. According to the company, government contracts account for roughly 14% of EU GDP or about €2.5 trillion a year across more than 250,000 contracting authorities but the process of competing for that money has remained largely manual, requiring firms to screen hundreds of tender notices daily, wade through lengthy documents and draft bids by hand.

In Italy specifically, the company cites ANAC data putting public tenders at €309 billion in 2025, up 13.9% year on year.

Cato uses technology to track more than 27,000 sources to surface and rank tenders companies are positioned to win, extracts requirements and evaluation criteria from those tender documents, flags inconsistencies between documents before they can cause disqualification, and pre-fills administrative and technical bid sections using a company’s own materials. It also makes every generated claim traceable back to its source, while the final submission remains in the customer’s control.

“Public procurement is one of the last giant unautomated workflows in the European economy: trillions of euros a year, and the supplier side has essentially had no software, let alone AI,” said Briehan Burke, General Partner at Keen Venture Partners.

She added, “Italy is the right market to start precisely because it is the most complex country to bid in: more than €300 billion a year across 22,000 contracting authorities, tens of thousands of SMBs whose largest customer is the state, and no AI-native software to help them win, which is exactly the kind of pain that makes a market worth owning and building from.”

Cato says it serves customers ranging from SMBs to large corporations across sectors including medical devices, construction, IT and services, and has processed thousands of tenders, with most customers opening the platform daily. Citing ChartMogul’s 2025 subscription-business benchmark, the company says it is growing faster than 95% of B2B SaaS companies worldwide.

The fresh capital brings Cato’s total funding to €7.6 million less than a year after its founding and will be used to strengthen the platform, expand commercially, and grow the team.

As part of its pre-Seed round, the company acquired Avvista.ai through an acqui-hire, bringing its founder, Riccardo Sabatti, and his team into Cato. Now, the company is bringing Luisa Gamba from Amazon Business, where she led public-sector partnerships in Italy, to the senior leadership team.

“Bringing in people of Luisa’s calibre says as much about Cato’s potential as the capital raise,” Zorzetto added.

Cato also plans to extend its platform into additional sectors and, in response to demand from existing multinational customers, beyond Italy’s borders.