Omnea CEO Ben Freeman knows procurement, or the process of buying goods or services for businesses, is “very unsexy.”
At the same time, it’s increasingly becoming top of mind for businesses and garnering the attention of investors, he said. That explains the recent growth of Omnea, which helps companies onboard and manage tools for employees, replacing what has been a manual process with AI.
“I often describe it kind of like the organizational plumbing of every business,” Freeman said of the procurement process. “They all have it. And it’s just how well you can do it.”
The company on Wednesday announced a $50 million Series B led by Insight Partners and Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel, Point Nine, and First Round Capital.
AI for procurement is heating up as economic pressures mean companies are squeezing margins — like shedding duplicative or lesser-used tools — and as President Donald Trump’s tariffs mean they’re keeping a closer eye on vendors, Freeman said. At the same time, the AI boom has resulted in a flurry of new tools requiring oversight.
Omnea lets employees make conversational requests for new tools. It uses AI to keep track of a company’s suppliers and routes requests to the right people. It flags issues for risk teams, delivers performance reports for executives, and helps launch requests for proposals (RFPs) — or when a company puts out a call for vendors to bid on their business.
Freeman dropped out of college to launch an events business and then joined email security company Tessian, where he served as head of international growth and came up with the idea for Omnea while selling enterprise software.
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He and Omnea’s cofounder and CTO, Ben Allen, are building the company alongside two former Tessian executives: chief commercial officer Abhirukt Sapru and chief financial officer Sabrina Castiglione.
Three-year-old Omnea has raised $75 million to date, including a $5 million seed round and a $20 million Series A in October led by Accel. It has global customers, including Spotify, Albertsons, Wise, Adecco, and MongoDB, Freeman said.
Omnea will use its funding to accelerate hiring across the US and UK. It has over 100 employees across London and New York, all of whom work in the office. Freeman said talent has been the “biggest bottleneck” to Omnea’s growth, given it’s “obsessive about talent density,” having interviewed over 10,000 people for its first 50 hires.
Omnea isn’t the only AI for procurement startup raising big money. Levelpath raised $55 million in Series B funding in June, while Zip raised $190 million at a $2.2 billion valuation last year.
