Cato, an Italian startup applying AI to public procurement, has closed a €6M seed round led by Keen Venture Partners, lifting its lifetime funding to €7.6M.
The round also drew Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7, Nova Venture and more than 20 private investors, plus angel investors including the founders of Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar. CEO Andrea Zorzetto returned to lead the company a year after publicly acknowledging the failure of his first startup.
Cato’s AI-native platform monitors more than 27,000 sources in real time, ranks opportunities by relevance, extracts requirements and evaluation criteria from tender documents, flags contradictions and pre-fills administrative and technical bid materials. The final submission stays under the customer’s control, with generated information linked back to its original source documents.
The company serves customers across Italy spanning medical devices, construction, IT and services, processing thousands of public tenders within six months of launch. The market is sizable: public procurement accounts for around 14% of EU GDP, roughly €2.5 trillion annually across more than 250,000 contracting authorities. In Italy alone, public tenders were worth €309B in 2025, according to ANAC.
The fresh capital will be used to strengthen the platform, expand commercial operations and grow the team, with plans to support customers across additional sectors and international markets. Public procurement remains one of Europe’s least digitized markets, which is what Cato is targeting with its automation layer.
