Cato raises €6m to sell AI into Italy’s €309.7bn tender market

The investment case for Cato is unusual. Most software sells on the promise of making a hard thing easy. Cato’s backers are betting that a hard thing stays hard.

The Milan startup has raised €6m in seed funding to sell AI to companies bidding for Italian public tenders. Keen Venture Partners, the Amsterdam and London firm, led the round. Existing backers Italian Founders Fund, Vento, Heartfelt, Moonstone, BHeroes, Alecla7 and Nova Venture all returned. The founders of Italian legal AI company Lexroom, plus Sibill and Pillar, came in as angels. That takes total funding to €7.6m, less than a year after the two founders started.

Briehan Burke, a general partner at Keen, put the thesis plainly. Public procurement, she said, is one of the last giant unautomated workflows in the European economy. Italy is the right place to start, she added, because it is the hardest country in...

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