Omnea Secures $25M in Funding to Revolutionize Procurement with AI

Omnea raises $20 million Series A

This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author. Accel led the round, with participation from existing investors First Round Capital and Point Nine, who led the previously unannounced $5M seed round. Omnea is also backed by angel investors David Clarke (former CTO of Workday), Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe), and Anne Raimondi (COO of Asana). The funding follows a year of hypergrowth for Omnea, with the company's revenue growing eightfold and impressive customer feedback on the platform's user experience and business impact. Most businesses today find the procurement experience extremely complex and difficult. This is because, in recent years, procurement has become increasingly decentralized, with legal, security, finance, ESG and governance considerations to factor into every purchase. It currently takes an average of six months and the involvement of upwards of 11 stakeholders for a tool to move from identification to final purchase. This delay often pushes exasperated employees to disregard the procurement process, resulting in unnecessary supplier risk and shadow IT. At the same time, the ongoing sprawl in tools and suppliers is creating wasted spend and inefficiency. Technology companies have an average of 125 tier-one suppliers that usually need to be reviewed on an at least an annual basis -- a time-consuming manual process that is often neglected, leading to wasted money every year with unnegotiated contracts, missed renewals, and underutilized suppliers. Omnea was founded in 2022 by Ben Freeman and Ben Allen to fix this frustrating and broken process with a scalable and easy-to-use procurement platform, in a global procurement software market that's expected to reach $13.9B by 2030. Having experienced the challenges surrounding today's procurement processes in his former role as US GM and Head of International Growth at cybersecurity leader Tessian, Freeman set out to change it. He identified that in a world demanding greater capital efficiency and more emphasis on risk and compliance, companies would need to overhaul their existing procurement processes and the antiquated systems they currently rely on. Omnea sits alongside these incumbent systems, which include P2P systems such as Coupa, SAP Ariba, and Netsuite's procurement modules. Omnea is the only platform that holistically manages and automates a company's full supplier lifecycle across both spend and risk management. Its platform increases the strength of a company's spend controls by automating procurement processes through Omnea's no-code workflows. In addition, Omnea ensures the process is easy to follow, meaning everyone involved - whether the requestor, legal, finance, information security, or IT teams - gets a custom experience and only has visibility of the information they need to review. This saves them time and money while preventing information security and compliance headaches. With clients across Europe, North America, and APAC, Omnea already counts numerous industry leaders like AlphaSights, McAfee, Onfido, and TeamViewer as customers. The leadership team consists of proven operators including Freeman's former Tessian colleagues Sabrina Castiglione as CFO (formerly CFO of Tessian, COO of Pento) and Abhirukt Sapru as CCO (former CRO of Tessian). The company will use the funding to triple its headcount by the end of 2025, investing in both the R&D and GTM teams as well as opening US offices. Alongside the funding, Omnea is today announcing expanded AI capabilities that further improve the employee experience of the procurement process. The company is also rolling out a new suite of advanced third-party risk management features, so supplier risk can be automatically and continually assessed throughout the full supplier lifecycle. Ben Freeman, co-founder and CEO of Omnea, said: "Procurement is fundamentally broken, making it one of the least-loved processes in businesses today. Finance and procurement leaders are fed up with seeing duplicative suppliers, missed renewals, and manually managed procurement processes. Omnea is meeting a critical need for companies of all sizes to get full control over their suppliers - not just in terms of spend, but also through the lens of information security and governance. We've seen significant early demand, and with our new AI capabilities and third-party risk management offering, we're the only company in the space truly automating the full supplier lifecycle. We're delighted to announce today's funding so we can continue on our mission to take the pain out of procurement and supplier management once and for all." Sonali De Rycker, Partner at Accel, said: "Business customers today are frustrated with traditional procurement software. Products are clunky and disjointed, generating numerous inefficiencies and unnecessary fees. We believe Omnea's approach to procurement automation and orchestration is compelling and has the potential to redefine this multi-billion dollar category. It's also exciting to partner once again with Ben, having gotten to know him and a number of the team well as a result of our early investment in Tessian. Having already attracted some of the UK's most ambitious early-stage operators, we're looking forward to seeing the Omnea team's continued growth." Alex Pilsl, Chief Procurement Officer at Teamviewer said: "Omnea has transformed how we manage procurement. We now have an intuitive front-door for all spend requests, the right people are automatically involved at the right time, and their orchestration layer connects all of our existing systems making the entire process seamless.The outcome is phenomenal." Nick Priest, Global Head of Procurement at McAfee added: "Omnea's UI/UX is best-in-market, and we evaluated plenty of systems out there. This is vital to drive maximum buy-in of Procurement as a strategic business partner in any organization.".

Omnea raises $25M to streamline procurement with AI - SiliconANGLE

Procurement software startup Omnea Ltd. today disclosed that it has raised $25 million in funding over two rounds. The most recent of the two investments, a $20 million Series A raise, was led by Accel. It also included contributions from First Round Capital and Point Nine, which earlier backed a $5 million seed round for Omnea. The software maker also counts former executives from Stripe Inc., Asana Inc. and Workday Inc. among its backers. London-based Omnea offers an artificial intelligence platform that promises to help enterprises more efficiently procure software and other offerings from their suppliers. The platform is built around a chatbot that enables workers to find products using natural language questions. A user could, for example, ask Omnea to provide a list of marketing tools that can help track the performance of ad campaigns. After receiving a procurement request, Omnea scans an enterprise's supplier database for potential matches. It can determine whether one of the companies on the list may have a product that fits the bill. According to Omnea, its platform thereby helps users avoid onboarding new suppliers unless strictly necessary, which saves time and effort. Before making a purchase decision, enterprises require suppliers to demonstrate that they have effective cybersecurity and regulatory compliance controls in place. A company buying a data analytics tool, for example, may wish to check whether the tool's developer adheres to GDPR. Procurement teams collect the necessary information by sending questionnaires to potential suppliers. Omnea provides an AI feature that automatically identifies what questionnaires are required for a given supplier. Moreover, the platform reviews the responses to spare workers the hassle. Omnea generates a summary of each issue it finds and visualizes the level of risk involved in a potential purchase using graphs. The company also promises to ease a number of related tasks. According to Omnea, its platform can autofill details such as pricing and renewal dates into a purchase order to reduce manual data entry. When a supplier contract is about to expire, Omnea generates an alert to help procurement teams avoid missed renewals. Additionally, the platform collects product feedback from the team that uses the offering up for renewal. Using that feedback, procurement professionals can identify opportunities to negotiate more favorable terms from the supplier. "Finance and procurement leaders are fed up with seeing duplicative suppliers, missed renewals, and manually managed procurement processes," said Omnea co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ben Freeman. "Omnea is meeting a critical need for companies of all sizes to get full control over their suppliers - not just in terms of spend, but also through the lens of information security and governance."