Omnea raises $20M Series A, led by Accel, to take the pain out of procurement and supplier management
- London-founded Omnea is an all-in-one procurement platform that automates the full supplier lifecycle, revolutionizing how companies control spend and manage third-party risk
- Omnea is led by alumni of cybersecurity leader, Tessian (acquired by Proofpoint in 2023)
- The company also unveiled its expanded AI capabilities for procurement and a suite of third-party risk management products
London, Monday 14th October 2024: Omnea, the AI-powered procurement orchestration and supplier risk management platform, has raised $20M in Series A funding to make procurement painless and give companies greater control over their spend. 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.”
About Omnea
Omnea is an end-to-end, AI-powered procurement and supplier management platform. With core offerings in procurement orchestration and automation, and additional modules for accounts payable and third-party risk management, Omnea is the only tool to holistically manage the full supplier lifecycle and provide a single source of truth for all supplier data. Omnea was founded in 2022, and is backed by Accel, Entrepreneur First, First Round Capital and Point Nine.
About Accel
Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. 1Password, Atlassian, Bumble, Celonis, CrowdStrike, Cyera, Freshworks, Miro, Netskope, Oasis, Qualtrics, Scale, Segment, Slack, Snyk, Spotify, Supercell, Tenable, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 40+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more information, visit accel.com or twitter.com/accel.