Thanks for the page
On October 1st, Cato, a Milan-based startup that builds software for public tenders, published a page on their website titled “Cato vs Tender Brain.” It made us happy, and it surprised us a little: being part of someone else’s comparison means the work of these past years is showing.
The page is carefully done and says accurate things about us, like our technical report generation and our dedicated version for contracting authorities. A few lines are missing or inaccurate, for a simple reason: it was written by reading our website, and our website says a lot, but not everything. They themselves write it honestly: “not indicated online” means “we didn’t find it on the public pages,” not that it’s missing from the product. It was missing from the pages, not from the product. This post is here to complete the picture — and to remind us that we need to update our website more often.
A note on how we work, because it explains the gaps. Tender Brain grows from the requests of the tender offices that use it: every feature inside it exists because a client needed it and asked for it.
A proposal: a mutual demo
A comparison made by reading websites has its limits, for both of us. So to Cato we propose something simple: we show Tender Brain to them on a real tender, they show Cato to us. Then each of us updates our own table with what we saw. The tender management market is large, and procurement offices need good tools — more than one. It makes sense for two companies working on the same problem to actually meet. The invitation is open, just send an email.
The table, completed
| Comparison item | What Cato writes about Tender Brain | What we add |
|---|---|---|
| Tender search and sources | “Doesn’t search for tenders: you upload the documents” | Tender Brain does search for tenders. It has dedicated agents for finding tenders that actually match what the company offers, not just keyword matches: anyone who has searched “software” on traditional portals knows they’ll find license resales and software maintenance contracts. Tender Brain’s tender registry contains every tender published by ANAC on the Legal Value Publicity Platform since January 5th, 2024, when the new procurement code took effect: over 67,000 tenders in total, around 2,900 currently open, updated every four hours. Since 2024, legal publication of tenders in Italy passes entirely through that platform, above and below threshold, regardless of which e-procurement platform the contracting authority uses: MePA, Sintel, START, Intercent-ER and the other certified platforms all transmit tenders to ANAC, where they appear with a link to the documents. You don’t need 25,000 sources: one is enough, the one required by law. Documents can also be uploaded manually for tenders arriving through other channels or, for larger organizations, imported directly from internal systems. |
| Foreign / EU tenders | “Not applicable” | Applicable, actually. Search on TED, European tenders, is activated on client request: it’s not in the standard profile because we prioritize the ANAC registry for its greater completeness of information. Outside the European Union, we’ve already worked on tenders from Morocco, in French: the product reads and responds in the language of the tender, whatever the country. |
| Reading tender documents | “Yes, summaries and technical responses” | Confirmed, and we add a few steps this line doesn’t mention. For every tender found, a go/no-go assessment of participation requirements and evaluation criteria in a summary sheet with sources cited, natural-language questions on the documents, economic analysis of the bid’s sustainability, bill of quantities (experimental) for works tenders, generation of technical responses with the agent asking for missing information, automatic evaluation of the technical report against the tender’s criteria. And after the outcome, the same evaluation can be used to prepare an appeal, if there are discrepancies between criteria and score. It flags inconsistencies because it finds them: it happens that a summary sheet answer reads “cannot answer: page 7 says yes and page 18 says no.” That’s exactly the right moment to send a clarification request to the contracting authority — before the bid, not after. |
| DGUE and administrative documentation | “DGUE not indicated” | For an agent, filling out the DGUE and administrative documentation is easy. But the administrative bundle is also the leading cause of exclusion from tenders: one wrong self-declaration, one missing attachment, and the best technical offer in the world never even gets opened. That’s exactly why we want a person to check it with full attention today, with AI freeing up their time to do so — while working on the part where points are actually won. |
| Outcomes, discounts and competitors | “Not indicated online” | Here Cato is right: outcomes and competitor analysis are something we don’t have today. Our registry contains the tenders, not the awards. Our clients asked us first to help them write better bids, and that’s what we built. We take this as an excellent suggestion: if clients ask for it, we’ll build it. |
| Human-delivered services | “Customization with consultants” | The tender stays with the tender office: Tender Brain is software you use on your own, and no one prepares the bid on the client’s behalf. Analysis sheets can be customized independently; anyone who wants help with training, archive uploads, or customizations can get it hourly, at public list price, with no obligation. People are genuinely involved in one case only: the Business package, for those who don’t want SaaS and instead deploy Tender Brain in their own cloud or on-premise, with their own SSO and systems. The software is the same. |
| How to try it | “Free demo” | Confirmed. You book a video call and our team runs the demo on one of the client’s real tenders, free and with no commitment. |
| Solidity | “Company registered in 2025” | True. And there’s a story behind it, below. |
Where Tender Brain comes from
Tender Brain Srl was founded in January 2025, in Gorgonzola, just outside Milan, at the same office as OpenGate: the company is new, and Cato is right to point that out. The product and the people behind it come from much further back.
Born from those who build AI. Built by those who do tenders. Tender Brain was born from the meeting of two crafts. On one side, BEC’S, a Rome-based company that has offered bid engineering services for twenty years on tenders for services, supplies and works: alongside its clients it has won public tenders across the most varied sectors — cleaning, maintenance, cemetery services, contact centers, reception services. On the other, OpenGate, a software house since 2004, Google Cloud and Scaleway partner, which built AIDeskPro, the generative AI platform for businesses that Tender Brain runs on. The first brought the method, the second brought the engine. The product has been operational with clients since March 2025, and we gave it a company of its own.
We congratulate Cato on their funding round: six million to bring AI into tender offices is good news for the whole industry, us included. We chose a different path — growing with our clients — and we’re happy with it. The two companies behind Tender Brain together generate more revenue than that figure every year: over seven million euros in revenue in 2025.
On data, which is always the first question we get asked: documents stay within a European perimeter, on infrastructure managed by us or by the client, with models on European endpoints and zero data retention thanks to enterprise agreements with each model provider. The client chooses the model. OpenGate, which develops and manages the platform, is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified for the design, development and support of cloud and generative AI solutions: the certification covers exactly the work we do on Tender Brain.
Where we agree
Two lines of their page we happily sign off on: “where Tender Brain is stronger: technical report generation and evaluation” and “dedicated version for contracting authorities.” These are the two things we’ve worked on the most, because they’re what makes the difference between winning and losing a tender: writing the bid that scores points. On a national tender worth billions of euros, which for confidentiality we can’t name, bid preparation time dropped by seventy to eighty percent.
Questions that remain open
Does Tender Brain search for tenders? Yes. Every tender published by ANAC on the Legal Value Publicity Platform since January 2024 (over 67,000, updated every four hours), TED on request, plus manual upload for everything else.
Can Cato and Tender Brain be used together? Cato says yes, and we agree. For our clients, search is already built in, but no single tool should be the only one on the desk.
Who decides what gets submitted in a tender? Always the tender office. Tender Brain prepares, reads, drafts and evaluates: the signature is a person’s. On this, reading their page, we think exactly the same way.
How much does it cost? It’s on our website, on the pricing page: starting at €199 per user/month with the Base cloud package, €289 with Pro (custom agents, SSO, integrations), and €299 with Business deployed in the client’s own cloud. With Base there are 15 days to try it and withdraw. All at list price, VAT excluded.
If you want to see the table live
Book a free demo on a real tender from your company.
The invitation goes for Cato too: same email, same form. Bring a tender, we’ll bring the coffee.
Cato is a trademark of Cato Srl. Information about Cato is taken from their comparison page published on October 1st, 2026. If something doesn’t add up, email us at info@tenderbrain.it and we’ll update it.