Cato raises €6M seed to bring AI to Europe’s public tenders
Keen Venture Partners leads a €6M seed for Milan's Cato, whose AI reads 27,000 tender sources and pre-fills bids. Twelve months in, Italy's founder flywheel is doing exactly what it was built to do.
Also see more funding coverage: /category/funding/
Founded 2025 · Milan, Italy
Milan-based Cato has raised a €6M seed round led by Keen Venture Partners, with Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture participating, to help companies find, analyse and win public tenders with AI.
The round, announced on 7 September 2026, takes the company to €7.6M raised barely a year after incorporation. Public procurement is where European software ambitions usually stall – fragmented portals, baroque documents, a different rulebook in every member state. And yet that mess is exactly why this round matters. Below, I lay out the round, the company behind it, and why a €2.5 trillion market that never got software is suddenly investable.
A €6M seed twelve months after incorporation
Keen Venture Partners leads the €6M seed, joined by Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture, plus more than 20 private investors including the founders of Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar. It follows a €1.6M pre-seed led by Italian Founders Fund, announced in April 2026 (Vestbee), and brings Cato’s total funding to €7.6M.
The capital goes to strengthening the platform, expanding commercially and growing the team, with plans to push into additional sectors and beyond Italy, per the announcement. “We are delighted that this value is also being recognised by an international investor like Keen Venture Partners, alongside the VCs who believed in us from the start,” said co-founder and CEO Andrea Zorzetto.
Keen’s Briehan Burke put the thesis plainly: “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.”
From 27,000 tender sources to one bid workspace
Founded by Zorzetto and Matteo Bossolini and incorporated in September 2025, Cato signed its first client the following month. The platform tracks more than 27,000 procurement sources, surfaces the tenders that fit a company’s profile, extracts requirements and evaluation criteria from the documents, flags inconsistencies, and pre-fills bid sections from the company’s own materials.
By April 2026 it had monitored over 100,000 tenders, analysed 2,000+ procedures and automated 500+ documents for 30+ client companies across healthcare, pharma, construction and IT (Vestbee, April 2026). Along the way it acqui-hired Avvista.ai, bringing founder Riccardo Sabatti and his team on board, and recruited Luisa Gamba from Amazon Business, where she led public-sector partnerships in Italy. The announcement says the company is growing faster than 95% of B2B SaaS companies, citing ChartMogul’s 2025 benchmark.
A €2.5 trillion market that never got software
The numbers here are the story. Public authorities in the EU spend around €2.5 trillion a year on goods, works and services – roughly 14% of EU GDP, spread across more than 250,000 contracting authorities (European Commission figures, cited in the announcement). Italy alone put €309.7bn of tenders on the market in 2025, up 13.9% year on year. The software layer over all of this remains thin: the global procurement software market is worth USD 10.74bn in 2026 and growing at a 9.76% CAGR to USD 17.11bn by 2031 (Mordor Intelligence, 2026-2031) – and most of that serves the buyer side. The supplier side, where every bidder wrestles with the same PDFs, is the half Burke calls essentially software-free.
For scale against this week’s European seeds in our fundraising data: Cato’s €6M lands between Zeit AI’s €5M seed for data engineering and Atira’s €12.9M Accel-led seed, both announced on 3 September. A solid European seed for a company selling into a market measured in trillions.
The Italian flywheel is starting to turn
What does this cap table tell us? Read the names again: Italian Founders Fund and Vento as institutional backers, and angels who built Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar – Italian founders recycling capital and conviction into the next generation. That flywheel took a decade to assemble in Paris and Stockholm; Milan is now running the same playbook, and a pan-European firm like Keen coming in to lead a Milan seed is the external validation the ecosystem has been waiting for.
The good news is that Europe’s bureaucratic complexity, for once, works in our favour: 27 procurement regimes and thousands of portals are a nightmare for founders to navigate and a moat for whoever automates them. A US competitor cannot shortcut its way through Italian tender law. The test to watch is the one Cato has set itself – whether a system trained on Italy’s €309.7bn tender market travels to the next country, where the documents, deadlines and evaluation grids all change shape. Seed-stage playbooks for that jump are well documented in our Series A funding playbook; execution is the hard part.
Twelve months from incorporation to a Keen-led seed, in a market worth 14% of EU GDP. Europe’s procurement stack is finally up for bid – watch the tender notices.
