Cato raises €6M to automate the public procurement workflow that software forgot

Cato (Milan) has closed a €6 million Seed round led by Keen Venture Partners, the Amsterdam- and London-based early-stage firm, with existing investors Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7, and Nova Venture returning alongside a cohort of angels including the founders of Lexroom, Sibill, and Pillar. The round brings total funding to €7.6 million, less than a year after the company's founding.

Founded in 2025 by Andrea Zorzetto (CEO) and Matteo Bossolini, Cato is an AI platform for public procurement — specifically the process of finding, analysing, and winning public tenders. The addressable market is not small: European government contracts account for roughly 14% of EU GDP, approximately €2.5 trillion annually, spread across more than 250,000 contracting authorities. In Italy alone, ANAC data puts public procurement at €309 billion in 2025, up 13.9% year-on-year.

The workflow nobody automated

Competing for state contracts has remained almost entirely manual. A company seeking to bid on public work must screen hundreds of tender notices daily across fragmented portals, wade through lengthy documents to extract evaluation criteria, ensure bid submissions contain no inconsistencies that trigger automatic disqualification, and pre-fill technical and administrative sections from scratch. For SMBs — the segment most dependent on the state as their primary customer — this requires either a dedicated procurement team or a specialist consultant. Most have neither.

Cato tracks more than 27,000 procurement sources to surface tenders matched to a given company's profile, extracts requirements and evaluation criteria from bid documents, flags inconsistencies before they cause disqualification, and pre-fills bid sections using the company's own materials. Every generated claim is traceable to its source; the final submission stays in the customer's hands. The company says customers open the platform daily and that it is growing faster than 95% of B2B SaaS companies worldwide by ChartMogul's 2025 subscription benchmark — a claim that is not independently verifiable but reflects a customer engagement pattern consistent with a tool used for an active, recurring workflow.

Capital, acqui-hire, and the expansion question

The round follows Cato's acquisition of Avvista.ai through an acqui-hire, bringing founder Riccardo Sabatti and his team into the company, and the hire of Luisa Gamba — formerly Amazon Business's lead for Italian public-sector partnerships — to the senior leadership team. Both moves are distribution bets, not product ones: the relationships that matter in Italian public procurement are human relationships.

Capital is allocated to deepening the product, growing the team, and moving beyond Italy. Keen Venture Partners' General Partner Briehan Burke named the Italian paradox directly: "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."

Andrea Zorzetto added that thousands of tenders are already being managed through the platform, and that clients increasingly treat it as an operational dependency: "Our greatest satisfaction is hearing from our clients that they see our technology as a true ally."

The expansion thesis requires Cato to replicate its source-coverage and traceable-claims infrastructure across the different regulatory frameworks of Germany, France, and Spain — each with its own contracting formats and disqualification rules. Italy's complexity was the wedge. European scale is the proof.