I first met Andrea in Silicon Valley, more than 10 years ago. I had an office inside Plug and Play, he came to me with this idea of convincing Plug and Play to open in Italy.
He told me, with his usual candid smiling face and his one-of-a-kind quiet humility, that he wanted to talk to the very network-driven CEO (whom he had never met before) to convince him that Italy was the next obvious place to start PnP operations. I remember very clearly thinking that I loved the energy, but that that was not going to happen. I told him everything I knew about how things were running there and my learnings from the previous years in the Bay Area. Then we promised to stay in touch and went our separate ways.
Three months later he calls me: the CEO said yes, Plug and Play Italy was happening, and he was going to run it.
From that point on, I knew that whatever he decided to build next, I would back him (and I would take it extremely seriously).
His “next thing” is Cato. And we are proud to announce that we led Cato’s €1.6M pre-seed round in Jan 2026, investing together with Heartfelt, Vento, Moonstone, Alecla7, B Heroes, Nova and IAG.
The journey
But the journey was not straightforward.
First he went to start and grow PnP Italy: built a great team, brought innovation to many legacy enterprise companies (and a breath of fresh air), helped put Italy on the map.
Then his last company, Peoplerank: built a great team, tried to tackle a complex problem with complex dynamics, decided to wind it down after trying his very best. Here you can find his journey.
During all these years we had coffees in San Francisco on very sunny days, video calls to update each other, panels where we shared what the future looked like from our point of view.
Then he went back to the drawing board, and the whole IFF team followed along for the journey.
The dots were all there, he just needed to connect them:
he was really good at building teams and attract great people
he was able to sell and convince enterprise customers to buy something without a clear $ ROI
he was passionate della cosa pubblica, and understood the dynamics of the public sector, but he was one of the few I’ve met who was looking at it with eyes of love and passion for really making things better (my whole family has been working in the public sector for generations, from doctors, to teachers, to admins, I know that fire when I see it)
he was amazing at telling stories and creating a brand (if you don’t believe me follow along)
he wasn’t scared of tackling difficult problems
When he first pitched me Cato I knew that if there was someone in Italy with a shot at this, Andrea was that guy.
But who to build it with?
Enter: Matteo
In 2026 you want a CTO that is extremely smart + quick thinker + able to leverage AI as much as possible both in internal processes and product wise + able to think in completely different ways than 2 years ago (or even 1?) when building a product + with a clear idea on distribution and go to market.
And in this specific case, cherry on top: passionate about PUBLIC TENDERS 🍒
Harder than building a unicorn 😅
But a very good investor (who also believed in Andrea from day zero, Elisa) made the match extremely well introducing Andrea to Matteo, a very young and super talented CTO → and Cato was born.
The day I met Matteo, I really wanted to like him, but I was also quite worried: when does “very young” become “too young”, especially in such a boomer-driven space?
Our whole team was ready for his live demo in a very formal “Sala Consiglio”: he executed spotlessly a very intriguing demo that made the product feel life-changing and inevitable for the users. It’s not easy to find someone who can build the product AND sell it at the same time.
If you know me by now, you know that 90% of my conviction was already in place at this point.
Let’s dive into what they’re actually building.
The problem: high‑value work on 20th‑century rails
If you walk into a serious tender/procurement office in Italy today, you see one thing: organized chaos.
Dozens of fragmented public platforms
Highly repetitive, manual workflows
Excel, local databases, email chains, copy‑paste from old proposals (most of them have slightly different versions of the same content)
Critical knowledge living in individual people’s heads
The crazy (but good for us) part is that this is very high value work. Each tender can be worth millions. Margins are decided by a handful of people operating under huge time pressure, with incomplete information, inside brittle processes.
And yet the infrastructure they use looks like accounting software from 2005.
Andrea and Matteo, with Cato, are building the AI‑native operating system for this world.
Their starting point is focused and unglamorous in the best possible way: the “heavy bidders”, mid‑sized enterprises that spend their days doing nothing but public tenders in a few verticals.
For these teams, Cato becomes the primary work surface:
finding relevant tenders,
structuring requirements and documentation,
drafting and managing responses with an AI agent tuned on their historical data,
tracking the internal workflow end‑to‑end,
closing the loop using historical data to understand what worked and what didn’t → proceeding to win more tenders 🏃♀️➡️
Usage is all day, every day, mail-like interaction.
Why the market is more interesting than it looks from the outside
One doubt kept coming up to me: “Isn’t the market too small to build a really large company?”
I challenged them over and over, with more than one “road to unicorn” sessions.
It turns out that you can already get to a pretty meaningful business just by doing the obvious things well: go deeper on heavy bidders, expand sectors, grow the number of customers from a few dozen to a few thousands. All good.
From there, there are multiple expansion paths, and they can run them in parallel (at some point).
One is going down the market to the “occasional bidders” or “not yet bidders”, with a PLG motion. Many companies don’t have a dedicated person or office to handle tenders, so they lose a lot of opportunities simply due to bandwidth. Cato can act as their tender office by surfacing opportunities and applying on their behalf. At first, you can even take a bet and do it on a revenue-sharing basis. That’s a completely different volume game: lower ACV, but hundreds and then thousands of customers. Same core product, much broader base.
The second axis of expansion is adjacent services. Once you own the workflow, you start seeing everything that sits around it. Certifications, insurance, legal services, financing against awarded contracts… all the boring but very expensive things that every company doing tenders needs anyway. Today they’re fragmented and under-leveraged. Tomorrow they can sit one click away from where the work is already happening (either via a take rate or by owning the feature).
Then private tenders. Same product, same users, very similar workflows. You don’t need to change much, you just unlock another chunk of demand that is at least as big as the public one.
Then Europe, both in terms of European tenders and in terms of other European markets. You don’t need to reinvent the product, you mostly need to figure out distribution country by country. Tricky one, many startups died or plateaued on this hill.
And finally, the most ambitious one. Today Cato helps companies respond to tenders. Over time, it can start serving the public sector itself. That’s a different market, slower and more complex, but also much larger and very much in need of better tools. At that point, you’re not just a tool anymore, you become the place where tenders get created, managed, and executed. The dream 🥰
Why we think they can win
TL;DR, here is the core of our thesis:
Category: unsexy, high‑value, structurally under‑served. Exactly where durable companies tend to be built.
Use case: daily, mission‑critical, with clear measurable ROI.
Product: AI‑first architecture in a domain where AI is not a nice to have but the only way to change the economics of the work.
Usage: all day, every day, mail-like interaction.
Timing: enough maturity in AI tooling to make this viable, not enough category consolidation for the winner to be obvious yet.
Team: founder‑CEO with a track record of persuading difficult institutions to do unlikely things, paired with a technical founder who ships fast and thinks natively in this stack.
And on top of that, we think that, ten years from now, the idea that multi‑million‑euro tenders used to be managed with email, Excel, and institutional memory will look absurd.
Don’t you?
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