Why we invested in Cato

‍The biggest customer nobody built software for

Governments buy almost everything- from hospital gloves to road resurfacing to IT support- from private businesses, and they buy a lot of it: public procurement is about 14% of EU GDP, roughly €2.5 trillion a year. In Italy alone, more than €300 billion flows annually through 22,000 contracting authorities every year, each with its own portal and its own 200-page documents.

The software for winning government business never got past simple tender search, which is the easy fifth of the job. Reading the documents, checking eligibility lot by lot, catching the deadline that contradicts itself across two annexes, drafting the bid: none of that could be automated before agentic AI. So while everyone else builds copilots for the SDR, the largest buyer in every European economy has suppliers running on Excel and binders.

‍Why Italy

Italy is the hardest procurement market in Europe to bid into by hand, and that is exactly why it's the best one to automate. More tenders, more buyers, more portals, more pain, more willingness to pay. Next to the tidy, centralised Dutch or British systems, Cato’s placement in Italy is akin to opening an umbrella shop in the middle of a rainstorm- customers are begging for the product. And since 2024 Italy has mandated fully digital procurement, so tender data became machine-readable at the same moment AI got good enough to read and action it.

What Cato does

Cato is the first AI-native platform for public-sector sales. Where the old tender search aggregators showed a company a simple list of tenders published that day, Cato every tender published and shows its customer the two tenders it can actually win, then does the rest of the work to win it: it checks the requirements, catches the errors, drafts the bid from the company's own material and cites every claim back to source. Customers apply to three to four times more tenders than before, win more of them, and open Cato every working day to do it. Over time, Cato becomes a system of record, a CRM for public sector sales- critical infrastructure for its customers’ continued success.

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An incredible growth trajectory

We met Andrea in Spring 2025 and were immediately impressed with the team, the technology’s value proposition, and early growth spurt- demand for Cato was clear. Even more impressive was that the demand was not subsidized whatsoever- Cato’s unit economics were unlike any we’d seen in early stage B2SME sales.

Soon after we were at the team’s office in Milan and even faster we’d issued a term sheet. Cato has continued to grow like a weed- indeed during summer’s typical sales slump, they banked record-breaking months in both revenue growth and customer acquisition.

The founders

Andrea Zorzetto and Matteo Bossolini are the kind of commercial - tech founder duo you dream about. Andrea has years of experience selling to SMBs and enterprises across Europe and Italy, even bringing a room of Italian CEOs to tears when discussing Italy’s previous waves of brain-drain and the urgency of bringing innovation back to the country. Matteo is proof that Italy can produce and keep home-grown innovators- a founder and CTO at 23 years old, truly AI-native in ways that anyone older has trouble understanding (much less perform successfully), combined with a sharp product mind that meets and exceeds customer needs with every deployment.

Together, they’re shaping an incredible culture at Cato- with highly enthusiastic employees and hires that are eager to join their rocketship. We can understand why.

Our third bet on Italian SMB software

Cato is our third investment in Italian SMB software after Sibill and Fiscozen, and it comes from a similar thread of conviction: the messiest, most under-served markets are the best ones to enter, because the pain is the moat. We're proud to lead this round alongside Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt and Cato's other early backers, and the founders of Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar, who joined as angels. Italy's AI winners are funding the next one. Andiamo.

Press Release

Cato Raises €6 Million Led BY Keen Venture Partners to Bring AI to Europe’s Largest Unautomated B2B Market: Public Sector Sales

Key Highlights

• Cato has raised €7.6m in funding since founding in late 2025; the €6m seed round is led by Keen Venture Partners with participation from existing investors (IFF, Vento, Heartfelt, B-Heroes) and a network of strategic angels

• Europe runs €2.5 trillion/year in public procurement, representing 14% of the EU’s GDP, through a highly manual process for the private companies bidding on government contracts

• Cato is Italy’s first AI-native platform for public sector sales, increasing primarily SMBs’ competitiveness in public tenders as its AI enables bidding and securing public tenders in a fraction of the time

• Launched less than 1 year ago, Cato already serves customers across Italy to prepare, bid, and win thousands of public tenders, and is growing faster than 95% of all B2B SaaS companies globally.

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Milan, Italy - September 7 2026 - Cato, the AI platform that helps companies find, analyse and win public tenders, today announced a €6 million seed round led by Keen Venture Partners, the Amsterdam- and London-based early-stage venture firm backing SME-tech founders across Europe. The round comes just months after a pre-seed led by Italian Founders Fund and brings Cato's total funding to €7.6 million. Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture all returned, and a group of angel investors joined that included the founders of Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar, three of the companies defining Italy's current wave of AI and software growth.

Governments are the largest customer most European businesses will ever have. Public procurement accounts for around 14% of EU GDP, roughly €2.5 trillion a year spread across more than 250,000 contracting authorities. Yet the software for selling to the state stopped at search. For companies that depend on public contracts, competing still means screening hundreds of notices a day, reading tender documents that run to hundreds of pages, checking eligibility lot by lot, and drafting bids by hand. In Italy alone, public tenders were worth €309 billion in 2025 (up 13.9% year on year, per ANAC), and the majority of SMBs say they struggle to compete for them.

Cato was built for everything that comes after tender search. Its AI monitors more than 27,000 sources in real time, ranks the opportunities each company is actually positioned to win, reads every tender document to extract requirements and evaluation criteria, flags contradictions between documents before they become disqualifications, and pre-fills the administrative and technical bid from the company's own material, down to the letterhead. Every claim is cited back to source, and the final submission always stays in the company's hands. Each tender a customer works on feeds a growing intelligence layer on competitors and outcomes.

The market has responded quickly. Six months after launch, Cato serves customers from all over Italy, from SMBs to large corporates, across medical devices, construction, IT and services, and has processed thousands of tenders. Most customers open the platform every working day. On that trajectory Cato is growing faster than 95% of B2B SaaS companies worldwide, according to ChartMogul's 2025 benchmark of subscription businesses.

"In this first phase we have already managed thousands of tenders. 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", says Andrea Zorzetto, CEO and co-founder of Cato. "We are delighted that this value is also being recognized by an international investor like Keen Venture Partners, alongside the VCs who believed in us from the start".

"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," said Briehan Burke, General Partner at Keen Venture Partners. "Italy is the right market to start precisely because it is the most complex country to bid in: more than €300 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, which is exactly the kind of pain that makes a market worth owning and building from".

Growing the team

The new capital will be used to strengthen the platform, expand commercially, and grow the team. The first senior addition is Luisa Gamba, who joins from Amazon Business, where she led public-sector partnerships in Italy from 2021, working with companies and institutions in a highly regulated environment with a pan-European outlook. Cato also plans to extend the platform to additional sectors to reach more customers, and meet the needs of existing multinational customers who are already asking for Cato’s support in their tender processes outside of Italy.

"Bringing in people of Luisa's calibre says as much about Cato's potential as the capital raise," Zorzetto added. "Luisa, joining from Amazon, strengthens our transition into a new phase of the company, which will soon see the arrival of more equally high-profile hires".

The round lands at a moment of record momentum for Italian technology. Startups raised €813 million across 145 rounds in the first half of 2026, according to Growth Capital and Italian Tech Alliance, with artificial intelligence the leading category, and a new generation of founders is now backing the next one: the founders of Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar are all angel investors in Cato.

About Cato

Cato is the AI-native platform for public sector sales. Founded in Milan in summer 2025 by Andrea Zorzetto and Matteo Bossolini, Cato reads, analyses and drafts public tenders so that companies can find the contracts they can win and bid for them in a fraction of the time. Six months after launch it serves customers across Italy and is backed by Keen Venture Partners, Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7, Nova Venture and more than twenty private investors. The company takes its name from Cato the Elder, the Roman censor who brought transparency and rigour to the Republic's public contracts. www.get-cato.com

About Keen Venture Partners

Keen Venture Partners is a European early-stage venture firm based in Amsterdam and London, backing exceptional founders building SME technology. Keen invests from seed to Series B across Europe and takes an active role in helping founders build category-defining businesses. www.keenventurepartners.com