Cato, an artificial intelligence platform that helps companies find, analyse and win public tenders, has closed a €6 million seed round led by Keen Venture Partners. The investment, announced on September 7 2026, brings the Milan-based company's total funding to €7.6 million and follows a pre-seed round led by Italian Founders Fund. Existing investors including Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture returned, while founders from Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar joined as strategic angel investors.
A Very Large and Manual Market
Public procurement accounts for around 14 percent of EU GDP, or roughly €2.5 trillion annually across more than 250,000 contracting authorities. In Italy alone, public tenders were worth €309 billion in 2025, according to ANAC, with about 22,000 contracting authorities operating separate portals and publishing lengthy, highly detailed documents. For companies that compete for these contracts, the process still involves screening hundreds of notices, reviewing complex documents, checking eligibility requirements and drafting administrative and technical bids by hand.
Automating the Full Tender Workflow
Cato is designed to handle the work that comes after basic tender search. The platform monitors more than 27,000 sources in real time and ranks opportunities according to a company's likelihood of successfully winning each contract. It reads tender documents to extract requirements and evaluation criteria, flags contradictions between annexes before they become disqualifications, and pre-fills administrative and technical bid materials using customer information, with every generated claim linked back to its original source.
Early Adoption and Competitive Impact
Six months after launch, Cato has processed thousands of tenders for customers across Italy, from small and medium-sized businesses to large companies in sectors including medical devices, construction, IT and services. Most customers open the platform every working day, and the company reports that users apply to three to four times more tenders than before while improving their win rates. Cato is growing faster than 95 percent of B2B software companies globally, according to ChartMogul's 2025 benchmark of subscription businesses.
Why Italy Offers a Strong Starting Point
Investors see Italy as an especially valuable market because its procurement system is among the most fragmented and complex in Europe. More than €300 billion flows through Italian contracting authorities each year, and since 2024 the country has mandated fully digital procurement, making tender data machine-readable for the first time at scale. Keen Venture Partners views this combination of high friction, high spend and newly available data as a strong foundation for an AI-native supplier platform.
Funding Priorities and Team Expansion
The fresh capital will be used to strengthen the platform, grow the commercial organisation and expand the team. Cato has already appointed Luisa Gamba, formerly of Amazon Business, where she led public sector partnerships in Italy from 2021, to support its next phase of growth. The company also plans to serve additional sectors and address demand from existing multinational customers that want support with tender processes outside Italy as it begins expanding internationally.
Cato's rapid early growth and new seed round reflect rising investor appetite for artificial intelligence applied to the vast public sector sales market. The involvement of founders from Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar signals that Italy's emerging AI leaders are actively backing the next generation of AI and software companies. With fresh capital, a growing team and international demand already visible, Cato is positioned to modernise how European businesses compete for public contracts.