Around a third of the taxes paid by Italian taxpayers are spent by the public administration on the purchase of goods and services and on the development of activities such as, for example: medical devices for hospitals, materials for schools, and construction projects ranging from the resurfacing of the road outside your home to major infrastructure works. In 2025, this amounts to approximately €500 billion, or around 10% of the country’s total GDP, and is carried out through procurement procedures by the public administration and semi-public companies. These procedures are burdened by a great deal of bureaucracy required to manage the thousands of tenders launched every day, each of which is accompanied by hundreds of pages to read; companies wishing to participate, and thus bid for the contract, must each time produce dozens of administrative documents to prove they meet the eligibility criteria, technical documents to demonstrate they possess the necessary expertise, and financial documents to ensure they can offer competitive prices.
“Il lavoro relativo a una gara è prettamente documentale, fino a due anni fa, poteva essere svolto solo da persone altamente qualificate, oggi però grazie all’IA si può automatizzare la maggior parte delle attività più ripetitive”, dice a Startupbusiness Andrea Zorzetto presentando la startup di cui è co-fondatore e CEO che si chiama Cato e si presenta al mercato come la prima specializzata nell’impiego dell’intelligenza artificiale per la gestione delle gare d’appalto italiane, costruita con la collaborazione di alcuni dei migliori uffici gara, e team commerciali per P), a livello nazionale.
Zorzetto, known for bringing Plug and Play to Italy after spending six years abroad, began working at Cato alongside Matteo Bossolini, who took on the role of CTO and was among the very first to adopt AI tools in programming. They were joined by a team that now comprises 12 people from all over Italy, with experience in start-ups and large companies across Europe (pictured).
“Today we are officially announcing the launch of Cato,” adds Zorzetto, “although it has actually been up and running on the market for some time now, to the extent that we already have over thirty active clients, including Sol, Ivs, CNS and Movi, based in both the north and south of the country. This has allowed us to thoroughly test the effectiveness and efficiency of our platform, which continues to improve over time and is designed to guarantee the total protection of the data of the individual companies that use it.”
Cato has secured a €1.6 million pre-seed round led by Italian Founders Fund, with Heartfelt, Vento, BHeroes, Moonstone, Alecla7, Nova, and over 20 business angels – including other Italian founders – also participating.
“To date, we have mainly worked on tenders for medical devices, medicines, various types of services, IT supplies and construction; the platform is used by over 200 users who are part of the organisations that are our clients; We have filtered over 60,000 tenders, of which over 2,000 have been analysed, generating over 500 documents that have been drafted and completed,” concludes Zorzetto. This translates into a significant acceleration in administrative processes, which, paradoxically, has no impact on jobs for two reasons: firstly, it does not replace human activity, as ultimately the documents must always be read, approved and signed before being submitted to participate in the tenders; and secondly, it must also be said that these skills – those of the people working in the tender offices – are becoming increasingly rare because those who possess them are approaching retirement age, and very few young people are pursuing this type of career. Therefore, for companies, turning to sophisticated technological tools is not merely a choice of efficiency and opportunity, but one that increasingly appears to be the only possible option.”
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©