Milan, 9 February 2026 - Kontai, the fifth startup launched by the startup studio Startup Bakery, announces the official entry of Lorenzo Cavicchi as co-founder and CEO, begins fundraising for the seed phase and kicks off development of the platform’s first MVP.

Kontai, born to bring order to the management of software subscriptions and recurring spend for companies, SMEs and scaleups, turns a fragmented, opaque ecosystem into a structured source of decision-making insight. The solution uses AI to automatically collect, organise and connect payments, renewals and incidents, offering companies a unified view of their relationships with SaaS vendors and supporting more conscious decisions on costs, usage and performance.

“Kontai perfectly represents the kind of startup we want to build at Startup Bakery: it is born from a real problem, experienced directly by the team, validated by the market even before the MVP, and led by a founder with deep knowledge of enterprise contexts, commented Alessandro Arrigo, CEO and co-founder of Startup Bakery. “In Lorenzo we found a profile able to combine product vision, operational experience and credibility with the corporate world. Clearing the Mix phase and the second investment by our Lab now allow us to accelerate on development, fundraising and go-to-market, with the goal of quickly building a concrete, measurable solution for the market”.

Lorenzo Cavicchi is an executive with over twenty years of experience in IT, digital transformation and data-driven operations, gained in complex industrial contexts. He has held positions of responsibility at companies such as Datalogic and Automobili Lamborghini, leading technology initiatives in support of business, operations and decision-making processes. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Data & Decision Intelligence Observatory and of the Scientific Committee of the HumanTec project, Humans and Technology, at Politecnico di Milano. In 2025 he completed the Executive Master in Management (EMIM) at POLIMI Graduate School of Management.

“My career in the IT world began in a startup. Over the years I have worked in large organisations, experiencing from the inside both the speed of innovation and the growth of complexity - added Lorenzo Cavicchi - Returning today to build in a startup is a natural choice: a way to close a circle, bringing with me the knowledge of business processes, the attention to data and the sensitivity to the real impact of technology choices developed over these years. The goal is building a product that speaks the language of companies, not only that of technology”.

Kontai has just successfully completed the Mix phase of the Startup Bakery path, completing the problem-solution fit stage and exceeding the pre-order target required to validate the project. Following this milestone, Startup Bakery Lab 2 approved a second investment ticket of €200,000, adding to the €100,000 already invested in the initial phase and bringing the overall commitment to €300,000. With Lorenzo Cavicchi’s entry and the start of the Bake phase, Kontai now enters the heart of its journey: MVP development, go-to-market and the opening of the seed round, with the goal of bringing to market an AI-native platform designed to transform the management of recurring spend from a cost centre into a strategic lever for companies.

The platform is aimed in particular at European SMEs and scale-ups with a high number of active software tools, which need to monitor recurring spend, renewals, billing anomalies and vendor performance.

“In recent years I have seen companies become ever more digital, but also ever more dependent on tools they often do not truly govern. SaaS has brought speed and flexibility, but also decision-making opacity - concluded Lorenzo Cavicchi - Kontai is born from this concrete friction that I experienced first-hand. The ambition is to transform the management of recurring spend from a reactive activity into a lever of governance: helping companies understand what they are using, what they are paying and where they are letting automatisms decide in their place**”.**

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Startup Bakery Startup Bakery is the Italian startup studio founded by Alessandro Arrigo and Angelo Cavallini in February 2020 with the goal of bringing to life sustainable B2B SaaS companies with a strong Artificial Intelligence component, and of allowing founders, companies and professional investors to express their potential. Contrary to what usually happens in the Venture Capital world, Startup Bakery relies on the involvement of industrial partners to put its initiatives to work. This path aims to reduce the degree of risk of doing startups, while maintaining high returns for its Limited Partners. The Studio guarantees the serial application of tools, skills and methodologies already present in the team, and stands beside the co-founder through every phase, from the raise to the exit, making them progressively more independent. Thanks to a proprietary algorithm, it can count on advanced capabilities for collecting and processing market data in order to identify niches of interest to occupy, while the cyclical validation of the initiatives launched is guaranteed by the application of the lean method. To date Startup Bakery has launched and invested in 5 startups: Veterly (2021, PetTech), Condeo (2022, PropTech), Sencare (2022, HealthTech), ESGmax (2023, Sustainability) and Kontai (2025, FinOps). startup-bakery.com