This Milan AI Startup Just Raised $6.4M to Crack Europe's Trickiest Market

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-07

Public tenders are a massive opportunity, yet most companies still chase them with spreadsheets, PDFs, and sheer grit. That's the gap Cato, a Milan-based AI platform, is attacking head-on. The company just closed a $6.4 million Seed round led by Keen Venture Partners, and the story behind the raise is about more than just fresh capital. It's about automating a trillion-dollar workflow that's been stuck in the dark ages. If you've ever tried to win a government contract, you know the pain: endless searches, dense documents, and a bidding process that feels designed to trip you up. ### The Size of the Prize Here's a staggering stat: government contracts account for roughly 14% of the EU's GDP, which translates to about $2.7 trillion a year. That money flows through more than 250,000 contracting authorities. In Italy alone, public tenders hit $335 billion in 2025, a 13.9% jump from the previous year, according to data from ANAC, the country's anti-corruption authority. For most businesses, competing for that money is a manual nightmare. Teams have to screen hundreds of notices daily, wade through lengthy legal documents, and draft bids by hand. It's slow, error-prone, and deeply frustrating. ### Cato's AI-Powered Solution Cato, founded in 2025 by Andrea Zorzetto and Matteo Bossolini, is Italy's first AI-native platform built specifically for public procurement. The technology does the heavy lifting that used to eat up weeks of your team's time: - Tracks more than 27,000 sources to surface and rank tenders your company is actually positioned to win. - Extracts requirements and evaluation criteria directly from those tender documents. - Flags inconsistencies between documents before they cause a disqualification. - Pre-fills administrative and technical bid sections using your own company materials. What's particularly smart is that every claim Cato generates is traceable back to its source. The final submission remains in your control, so you're not handing the keys to an AI black box. You're getting an assistant that does the grunt work while you keep the final say. ### Why Italy Is the Perfect Starting Point You might wonder why a startup would launch in Italy, a market known for its bureaucratic complexity. According to Briehan Burke, General Partner at Keen Venture Partners, that's exactly the point. > "Italy is the right market to start precisely because it is the most complex country to bid in: more than $325 billion a year across 22,000 contracting authorities, tens of thousands of SMBs whose largest customer is the state, and no AI-native software to help them win." It's a classic beachhead strategy. If the platform can survive and thrive in Italy's tangled procurement web, expanding to simpler markets becomes a much easier sell. ### Traction and Team Growth Cato's early numbers back up the hype. The company says it's growing faster than 95% of B2B SaaS companies worldwide, according to ChartMogul's 2025 subscription-business benchmark. Most customers open the platform daily, which suggests it's becoming a habit rather than a novelty. Zorzetto, the CEO, emphasizes the real-world impact: "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." To keep that momentum, Cato is also stacking its leadership bench. The company recently brought in Luisa Gamba from Amazon Business, where she led public-sector partnerships in Italy. She joins Riccardo Sabatti, whose team came aboard through an acqui-hire of Avvista.ai during the pre-Seed round. ### What's Next With total funding now at $8.2 million less than a year after founding, Cato has the runway to strengthen its platform, expand commercially, and grow its team. The plan is to keep pushing into new sectors, from medical devices to construction and IT services. Public procurement is finally getting its AI moment. And for the thousands of businesses currently stuck in manual bid-writing hell, Cato's timing couldn't be better. The company is turning a painful chore into a strategic advantage, and that's a bet worth watching.