Cato raises €6M to expand its AI platform for public sector sales

Italian startup Cato has closed a €6 million seed round to push its AI platform further into the messy business of public procurement. The round was led by Keen Venture Partners, with support from Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture, plus angel investors including the founders of Lexroom, Sibill and Pillar.

This brings Cato’s total funding to €7.6 million, after an earlier pre-seed round led by Italian Founders Fund. The company is aiming at a market that is huge by any normal standard: public procurement makes up around 14% of EU GDP, or about €2.5 trillion a year across more than 250,000 contracting authorities. In Italy alone, public tenders were worth €309 billion in 2025, according to ANAC.

Cato’s pitch is simple enough to understand, even if the work it replaces is not. It watches more than 27,000 sources in real time, flags tenders that matter to a given company, and uses AI to read the documents, pull out requirements and evaluation criteria, spot contradictions and pre-fill parts of the bid. The customer still controls the final submission, and the system links generated information back to its original sources.

Six months after launch, Cato says it has already processed thousands of tenders for customers in Italy, from SMEs to larger firms in medical devices, construction, IT and services. The company says the new money will go into product development, sales and hiring, while also helping it move into more sectors and support multinational customers outside Italy as it expands internationally.