Cato secures €6 million seed funding to scale its AI platform for global public procurement

Barely five months after disclosing a €1.6 million pre-seed round, Milan-based Cato says it has grown from more than 30 active clients and 200 platform users to 150 active customers, while building a 35-person team and securing a fresh €6 million seed investment on Monday. The new round, led by Keen Venture Partners, brings total funding to €7.6 million. (s...

The syndicate mixes returning Italian backers with a new cross-border lead. Keen was joined by Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture, while angel investors included the founders of Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar. According to Keen and Corriere’s Borsa report, the money is earmarked for product development, commercial expansion and hiring, starting with Luisa Gamba, who is joining from Amazon Business after leading its Italian public-sector partnerships since 2021. Keen also said some existing multinational customers are already asking Cato to support tender work outside Italy, giving the company an early reason to look beyond its home market. (keenventurepartners.com)

Cato’s pitch is not simply that it can find notices faster. Tech.eu reported that the platform monitors more than 27,000 sources in real time, ranks opportunities by relevance, extracts requirements and scoring criteria from tender documents, spots contradictions between different files and pre-fills administrative and technical bid papers using the customer’s own information. Keen said every generated claim is tied back to a source document and the final submission remains in the customer’s hands. On Cato’s own website, the company says customer and tender data are not used to train general-purpose AI models and that its development processes are ISO/IEC 27001-certified. The same site currently refers to 25,000-plus sources rather than 27,000, suggesting the figure is still being updated as coverage expands. (tech.eu)

That proposition helps explain investor interest in a niche that is larger than it sounds. Keen put public procurement at about 14% of EU GDP, or roughly €2.5 trillion a year across more than 250,000 contracting authorities. ANAC, Italy’s anti-corruption authority, said contracts worth €309.7 billion were awarded in 2025, up 13.9% year on year, across 287,421 procedures, with around €20.8 billion linked to the country’s post-pandemic recovery plan. (keenventurepartners.com)

Yet the official Italian data also point to a complication for the investment story. Burke argued in Keen’s announcement that Italy is attractive because it is so fragmented, citing 22,000 contracting authorities. ANAC’s own figures show a state system moving the other way: analogue procedures have fallen from 21% to 1% in two years, the share of authorities using them at least once a year has dropped from 45% to 1%, and the authority says its virtual operator file checked about 175,000 businesses in 2025 and issued more than four million certifications. Separate ANAC data showed 3,680 qualified contracting authorities at the end of 2025, lower than the 22,000 cited by Keen, although the two figures are not measuring precisely the same thing. ANAC has also warned that direct awards in services and supplies have swollen to 95% of acquisitions in those categories, clustered just below the threshold. For Cato, the bet is that digitising the public buyer does not remove enough complexity on the supplier side to shrink the need for specialist software. (keenventurepartners.com)

The company has been broadening its reach ahead of this financing. In July, Startupbusiness reported that Cato had completed an acqui-hire of Avvista.ai, a young company founded by Riccardo Sabatti whose self-service tools were aimed at firms handling only a small number of tenders and lacking an internal bid team. Startupbusiness said Cato had passed 100 clients by the end of its first year of operations and framed the deal as a way to cover both first-time SME bidders and larger organisations running more complex procurement work. The same report said 60% of SMEs still struggle to compete effectively in public tenders. (startupbusiness.it)

Cato’s founders have their own comeback narrative. EconomyUp reported in April that Andrea Zorzetto had publicly discussed the failure of his previous start-up a year earlier before returning with Cato, while Matteo Bossolini, the company’s 23-year-old co-founder and chief technology officer, had been programming since the age of 12 and had worked across several start-ups while living between Paris and Berlin. Zorzetto, who turned 32 in July, told EconomyUp that his background in public policy and work in the UK Treasury and the City of Paris helped him recognise procurement as a neglected software category. The publication also noted that the company’s name refers to Marco Porcio Catone, invoked as a symbol of integrity in the handling of public money. (economyup.it)

There are signs of unusually fast early uptake, at least by the company’s own account. Keen said Cato has already processed thousands of tenders and claimed that most customers open the platform every working day; it also said the business is growing faster than 95% of B2B SaaS companies in ChartMogul’s 2025 benchmark. Cato’s website, meanwhile, still advertises that it has been “Chosen by 100+ companies in just 6 months”, a figure that sits below Corriere’s report of 150 active customers on Monday and looks like a lagging marketing update rather than a contradiction. (keenventurepartners.com)

What happens next will show whether the company’s real moat is Italian bureaucracy or the wider mechanics of bidding for the state. Keen is backing the first theory. The evidence from Cato’s product, the Avvista acqui-hire and early customer mix points to the second: a tool for suppliers who still need help reading dense documents, marshalling evidence and meeting deadlines even as the public system itself becomes more digital. Either way, Monday’s round gives the start-up more capital to prove that a business built around public tenders can travel beyond Italy without losing the local expertise that made it investable in the first place. (keenventurepartners.com)

Source: Noah Wire Services