• Cato has obtained €6 million in seed financing, with Keen Venture Partners as the lead firm, bringing its total funds raised to €7.6 million.
• The AI is used by the Milan-headquartered startup to help companies secure a share of Italy’s €309.7 billion tender market.
• One year after publicly admitting the failure of his earlier startup, Andrea Zorzetto has returned as CEO.

Andrea Zorzetto has been open about the failure of his first startup in the last year. His second company has now secured €6 million in funding, led by Keen Venture Partners, to develop software that helps small businesses receive payments from government contracts.

This round brings Cato’s total funding to €7.6 million, with investors including Keen Venture Partners, Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7, Nova Venture, and more than 20 private investors. Its new angel investors include the founders of Lexroom, Sibill, and Pillar.

Public procurement is the largest and at the same time the least modernised method of placing orders in Europe. More than 250,000 public bodies throughout the EU spend around €2.5 trillion every year, which amounts to 14% of GDP, on a range of items such as hospital equipment and road repairs. When bidding for contracts with them, one still has to read hundreds of pages of tender documents, verify each eligibility clause, and prepare the bids mainly by hand.

In Italy, the value of tenders was €309.7 billion in 2025, a 13.9% increase from the previous year, according to the country’s anti-corruption body, ANAC.

Cato, founded in Milan by Zorzetto and Matteo Bossolini, employs AI to help companies find, understand, and submit bids for public tenders, which are generally complex and involve extensive paperwork.

“Our greatest satisfaction is hearing from our clients that they see our technology as a true ally. It helps them find the most suitable public tenders, understand the requirements and prepare their bid, increasing their chances of winning and growing,” Zorzetto said.

The comeback

Zorzetto and Bossolini came together in June 2025 and produced the initial version of Cato within one week. Zorzetto had just shut down Peoplerank, the LinkedIn-reputation startup which he had founded after spending six years working in the British and French governments. Although he had not intended to go back to Italy, Bossolini still joined him.

The company was incorporated in September, secured its first client, who was prepared to pay in October, and, by December, had completed a pre-seed financing round of €1.6 million, with the Italian Founders Fund as the lead investor.

Founded in 2025, the startup tracks public tender notices in real time, extracts requirements and evaluation criteria from each document, and pre-fills the administrative and technical sections of bids using the company’s own materials, such as letterhead. Each claim links back to its source, and the finished submission stays with the client.

Cato isn’t alone in trying to automate this workflow, but its closest-funded rivals are elsewhere. The UK’s Stotles raised a $13 million Series A last year and now serves more than 1,000 public-sector sales teams, including Amazon and Salesforce; Netherlands-based Altura closed an €8 million Series A around the same time for its own AI bid-management platform.

Neither has built specifically for Italy’s more fragmented, paperwork-heavy tender system — the gap Cato is counting on to hold off both of them.

This funding round comes as Italian tech is making a comeback, with startups raising €813 million across 145 rounds in the first half of 2026, according to Growth Capital and the Italian Tech Alliance. AI is still the top category, even though Italy remains one of Europe’s most underfunded VC markets per founder.

“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. Italy is the right market to start precisely because it is the most complex country to bid in,” said Briehan Burke, general partner at Keen Venture Partners.

Growing the team

The new funding will help improve the platform, support business growth, and expand the team. Cato also plans to move into new sectors and help multinational clients with tenders outside Italy. 

The complexity that now keeps small businesses out of public contracts could become a competitive advantage once it is automated. Whether this edge will help Cato beyond Italy’s fragmented tender system, or if a better-funded UK or Dutch competitor will win out, will become clearer in the next funding round.