Cato 😎

It's time for builders #47

Cato is our startup’s new name.

We’re going to transition to it starting next week.

Finally!

It’s been 9 months basically since we started.

Well, actually, that’s the time you usually get to pick the name 😂

Jokes aside, AppaltiGPT was a placeholder name we picked quickly.

We started building and selling from day 1, rushing into validation before anything else.

Then things moved very fast, and here we are, 11 people and dozens of clients.

Now is the time for rebranding.

Thanks to Tom, my home neighbour and office landlord, for suggesting it.

Paranoid 😱

Yes, for a few weeks, we were almost set on using this shocking new name.

Even more aggressive than Peoplerank.

The idea was that to be successful in tenders, you have to be super precise, double-check everything, and not miss any details.

Indeed, a few of our clients even loved it.

But it was too negative for most people, and for a B2B brand, it didn’t make sense.

Cato 🏛️

We wanted a simple, solid name that didn’t use the word tender in any way.

Too many European lookalikes are called like that.

Also, we want to humanise our product.

Harvey picked the name of a famous fictional lawyer.

We picked the name of Cato, a famous ancient Roman.

An important mission

Tenders are our taxes.

Cato (the younger) was a symbol for handling public money honestly and doing things very, very well.

In our case, the latter is actually the real challenge.

Quite often, when I talk about tenders, people ask me about corruption.

We haven’t seen any sign of it yet.

We do see massive inefficiencies all over the place, though.

I think the problems in our public sector are 1% bad intentions and 99% poor system design, wrong incentives, and overcomplicating everything.

We want to apply AI so that companies don’t waste time on bureaucratic work and can compete by offering better goods and services to citizens.

Simple yet powerful

Cato also lived simply, but was a man of great substance.

This is how we are building our product.

Intuitive, but mind-blowing in its impact.

On this note, the tech team realised the first version of our agentic chat this week.

It can perform very advanced tasks like drafting technical documentation for the bid or finding lots of intelligence about competitors.

Our 2 colleagues who come from the world of tenders are still shocked that this is already possible.

On the roadmap we sketched for the pre-seed round, we thought this wouldn’t happen before 2027.

And here we are.

Our ambition

Cato (the elder) is the one famous for “Carthago delenda est”.

In a way, it means being restless till total victory.

Probably for that reason, it’s popular in Silicon Valley, too.

But actually, you can see Latin - instead of English - as a signal that it’s time to build European software companies.

This makes particular sense in the world of tenders, as there are common EU-wide regulations.

So we both aim big and are Europe-first.

Marketing is about values…

And these are ours 😉

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