€6m · Seed · Software · Milan, Italy
Milan-based Cato has raised a €6m seed round led by Keen Venture Partners to expand its AI platform for companies bidding on public contracts. Returning investors include Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture, while founders of Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar joined as angels.
The round follows Cato's €1.6m pre-seed and brings total funding to €7.6m. The company plans to use the new capital to develop the platform, expand commercial operations, grow the team, enter additional sectors and support multinational customers that want help with tender processes outside Italy.
Moving beyond tender search
Cato is built for the work that begins after a company finds a public tender. According to Tech.eu, the platform monitors more than 27,000 sources, ranks opportunities against a customer's profile, reads tender documents for requirements and evaluation criteria, flags contradictions, and prepares administrative and technical bid materials. Generated claims link back to source documents, while the customer retains control of the final submission.
That traceability is central to the commercial proposition. In public procurement, a plausible but unsupported answer can disqualify a bid, so Cato is selling more than drafting speed: it is trying to become a controlled workflow for deciding where to bid and assembling evidence. The company says it had processed thousands of tenders six months after launch. TNW reports that Cato says its customer base grew from 30 in April to more than 150 by September.
The Italian starting point offers both demand and a test of durability. TNW cites national anti-corruption authority ANAC figures showing €309.7bn of public contracts across 287,421 procedures in 2025. At the same time, buyer-side procurement is becoming more digital and consolidated. That may make tender data easier for software to process, but it can also remove some of the friction on which specialist tools initially compete.
Cato's longer-term opportunity therefore depends on turning local workflow knowledge into a system customers keep using as procurement changes. Its source-linked outputs, accumulated company data and expansion into additional sectors could deepen that position. International growth will require the platform to absorb different portals, rules and submission practices without losing the reliability that makes customers trust it with live bids.
Explore this theme
Fixing Fragmentation: How Unified Regulation Can Unlock European Innovation — Speedinvest & Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, partner article hosted on EUVC · 3 December 2025. Its public-procurement proposals add a policy view on the fragmented processes that Cato is attempting to turn into software.
Sources checked:
Keen Venture Partners · Tech.eu · TNW · Cato website · Tech.eu company · Tech.eu deal
