Cato, a Milan start-up that uses AI to help companies bid for Italian public tenders, has raised €6m (about $7m) in a seed round led by Keen Venture Partners, The Next Web reported on 7 September 2026.
Existing investors Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture also took part. The founders of Italian legal AI company Lexroom and people from Sibill and Pillar invested as angels, according to The Next Web.
The round takes Cato's total funding to €7.6m (about $8.8m). The valuation was not disclosed.
What Cato does
Cato's software tracks more than 27,000 sources of public tenders in real time, matches them to companies, and uses AI to read tender documents, pull out the requirements and evaluation criteria and help prepare bids, according to Vestbee. The Next Web reported that every claim the system produces links back to a source document and that customer data is not used to train general-purpose models.
The company says it has about 150 active customers in medical, IT, services and construction, up from 30 in April, according to Teleborsa and The Next Web. Named customers include MOVI, Kaster Medical Technology, Favero Health Projects, Lionhealth, Respiraire and AHSI. Chief executive Andrea Zorzetto told Teleborsa that the company had already handled thousands of tenders.
Zorzetto and Matteo Bossolini founded Cato in 2025 and incorporated it in September of that year. Zorzetto previously brought the Plug and Play accelerator to Italy and ran a start-up that closed in 2025. Bossolini is the technical co-founder. The team has 35 people, according to Teleborsa.
What the money is for
Cato will spend most of the new money on its platform, sales expansion and hiring, Teleborsa reported. Vestbee said the company also plans to move into new sectors and international markets, starting by helping existing multinational customers with tenders outside Italy.
Cato has hired Luisa Gamba, who led public-sector partnerships for Amazon Business in Italy from 2021.
Briehan Burke, a general partner at Keen, told The Next Web that public procurement was one of the last large unautomated workflows in Europe and that Italy was a good place to start because bidding there is especially hard.
A large but changing market
Italian public contracts were worth €309.7bn (about $361bn) in 2025, across 287,421 contracts, according to figures from the national anti-corruption authority ANAC cited by The Next Web. Across the EU, public procurement totals about €2.5tn (about $2.9tn) a year, or roughly 14% of GDP.
The Next Web also noted that ANAC has cut the number of qualified contracting authorities from more than 20,000 to about 4,000, and that analogue procedures fell from 21% of the total to 1% in two years. Competitors include Stotles in the UK and Altura in the Netherlands, neither of which focuses on Italy, according to the same report.
The funding so far
Cato raised a €1.6m (about $1.9m) pre-seed round led by Italian Founders Fund in April 2026, according to Vestbee and Teleborsa. During that round it acqui-hired a smaller company, Avvista.ai, The Next Web reported.
Company website: get-cato.com