Cato Raises €6M to Help Firms Win Public Tenders With AI

Cato, a Milan-based AI startup helping companies navigate Europe's notoriously complex public procurement process, raised €6 million in seed funding led by Keen Venture Partners, bringing the company's total funding to €7.6 million just over a year after its founders started the company, according to EU-Startups' reporting on the round. Existing investors Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7, and Nova Venture returned, joined by angel investors including the founders of Lexroom, Sibill, and Pillar.

Cato tracks more than 27,000 sources in real time to surface and rank public tenders companies are genuinely positioned to win, then extracts requirements and evaluation criteria directly from 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, according to Tech.eu's reporting on the platform. Every generated claim remains traceable back to its original source, and the final submission stays entirely under the customer's control rather than being auto-submitted.

Cato at a Glance

CEO Andrea Zorzetto's path to this raise carries a genuinely candid personal narrative worth understanding. Zorzetto had publicly acknowledged the failure of his previous startup, Peoplerank, a LinkedIn-reputation company, after spending six years working in the British and French governments, according to Tech Funding News's detailed account of the company's origins. Zorzetto and co-founder Bossolini came together in June 2025 and produced Cato's initial version within a single week. The company was incorporated in September 2025, secured its first paying client by October, and closed a €1.6 million pre-seed round by December, a genuinely rapid trajectory for a company now less than 18 months old.

The Next Web's analysis framed the underlying investment thesis in a genuinely unusual way: most software companies sell on the promise of making a hard task easy, but Cato's backers are explicitly betting the underlying process, navigating Italy's famously fragmented, paperwork-heavy tender system, stays structurally difficult, creating durable demand for a tool that manages that complexity rather than eliminating it entirely, according to The Next Web's reporting on the round. Keen Venture Partners General Partner Briehan Burke framed the broader market opportunity directly: "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." Burke added that "Italy is the right market to start precisely because it is the most complex."

Cato has already processed thousands of tenders for customers spanning medical devices, construction, IT, and services within six months of launch, according to FinSMEs' reporting on the raise. The company also strengthened its team strategically ahead of this raise, hiring Luisa Gamba from Amazon Business, where she led public-sector partnerships in Italy, and absorbing a smaller company, Avvista.ai, in an acqui-hire during its earlier pre-seed stage.

Cato's raise is worth understanding for any business that regularly bids on government or public-sector contracts, since the platform addresses a genuinely underserved category of B2B software, tools built specifically for suppliers navigating public procurement, rather than the more commonly funded category of government-facing procurement software itself.

For businesses evaluating AI vendors in regulated, document-heavy workflows more broadly, Cato's specific emphasis on source traceability for every generated claim, paired with keeping final submission control entirely with the customer, offers a useful template for how AI tools can meaningfully accelerate compliance-heavy processes without removing necessary human oversight of the final output.

What does Cato's AI platform actually do?
Cato helps companies find, analyze, and prepare bids for public sector tenders, tracking more than 27,000 sources to surface relevant opportunities, extracting requirements from tender documents, and pre-filling administrative and technical bid sections while keeping final submission control with the customer.

How much funding has Cato raised?
Cato raised €6 million in seed funding led by Keen Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to €7.6 million since its founding in June 2025, following an earlier €1.6 million pre-seed round.

How big is the public procurement market Cato is targeting?
Italy's public procurement market is worth roughly €309.7 billion, part of a broader EU-wide public procurement market estimated at approximately €2.5 trillion annually, representing about 14% of total EU GDP.

Milan-based Cato raised €6 million in seed funding led by Keen Venture Partners to scale its AI platform helping companies find, analyze, and win public sector tenders, bringing total funding to €7.6 million just over a year after founding. The platform monitors more than 27,000 tender sources, extracts requirements from documents, flags inconsistencies, and pre-fills bid materials while keeping final submission control with the customer, targeting Italy's €309.7 billion public procurement market as a starting point for broader European expansion. Founder Andrea Zorzetto built the initial product within a week of teaming up with his co-founder in June 2025, following the earlier public failure of his previous startup, Peoplerank.