Ask anyone who has tried to buy software inside a large company, and you will hear a version of the same story. A request goes out. It disappears into a maze of approvals, legal reviews, security questionnaires and finance sign-offs. Weeks pass. By Omnea's own accounting, the average enterprise purchase takes roughly six months and pulls in eleven stakeholders before anyone signs anything.
Omnea, founded in 2022 by Ben Freeman and Ben Allen, is a bet that this does not have to be the case. The company builds what it calls an "agentic operating system for procurement" - a single platform where an employee can type what they need in plain English, and the software figures out who needs to weigh in, which systems to touch, and how to keep the whole thing compliant.
The two founders are not procurement lifers. They came from Tessian, the London cybersecurity company acquired by Proofpoint in 2023. Freeman ran international growth there; both watched, from the inside, how much value leaks out of a company through the unglamorous plumbing of buying things.
Their pitch to customers - and to investors - is blunt. The value in procurement is not locked in a vault. It is locked in spreadsheets, email threads and disconnected systems that no one person can see all at once. Unlock that data, the argument goes, and you find money and risk you did not know were there.
"Supplier data value is locked in spreadsheets and siloed systems. Our platform unlocks that data across the organization." — Ben Freeman, CEO
It is a message that has landed. In September 2025, Omnea announced a $50M Series B led by Insight Partners and Khosla Ventures, taking total funding past $75M. In the twelve months before that raise, the company says revenue grew roughly fivefold and headcount tripled. Enterprise names - Spotify, Wise, MongoDB, Albertsons, the Adecco Group - moved onto the platform.
What Omnea is really selling is a change in status. Procurement has long been treated as a back-office cost center, the department that says no. Omnea's wager is that with the right software, the same team becomes the one that finds savings and flags risk early - the CFO's quiet competitive advantage rather than a tax on getting work done.
