Procurement – ​​the process of requesting, verifying and ultimately purchasing IT and other supplies in an organization – is usually one of the most frustrating, dry, but unavoidable aspects of a workplace.

When you need a new app or device, or when you need to renew an existing contract for a device in your regular life, you just have to get started. But at work? You may already know what you need, but getting it isn’t that simple. There are budgets, management approvals, pre-existing IT contracts, security checks, price negotiations and other steps that can complicate the process.

A London startup called Omnea has built a platform to reduce this pain and today announces that it has raised $25 million in funding to expand – specifically a $20 million Series A and seed round of 5 million dollars that it announced for the first time. Today.

Omnea does not disclose its valuation. (Would you expect anything less from a startup whose goal is to help companies gain the upper hand in price negotiations?) But to explain why investors are backing it, the company says that last year its revenue increased 8x from a client list that includes McAfee, Onfido, Proofpoint, Podimo, Robin AI, Sana and Typeform.

Omnea was co-founded by Ben Freeman and Ben Allen, two former senior executives at cybersecurity company Tessian, who saw first-hand how complicated procurement was, both from inside their own companies, but more importantly from the outside as a supplier to others. businesses.

“We sold email security to mid-sized and large businesses, everyone,” said Freeman, the CEO. “Our buyers were dreading purchases. They would literally do all the demos, go through all the steps and then at the end there was this poor guy from procurement, or whoever, who showed up at the eleventh hour.

This last minute person was there to negotiate prices, but it was obvious that the task was never going to go very well for the buyer due to the lack of information and context. “They weren’t involved early enough to negotiate,” Freeman said. From this perspective, either the deal would fail or it would simply pass, neither of which are good outcomes.

Omnea is tackling a major challenge, which has undoubtedly spread to the world of work.

In the past, purchasing may have been just another department in a business, approving or rejecting (but usually stamping) payment requests for something new – especially in smaller businesses or at least in companies with a smaller technological footprint.

Nowadays, this process has undergone a radical change, thanks to the complexity of the paperless office.

Software is purchased as a service and almost everything, even a notebook, comes as software. Or, that notebook comes in the form of hardware that now requires regular updates.

All the software and hardware intertwine through the Cloud, and you get a spaghetti effect of many things that work together, but can also conflict and overlap. Report security and IT issues.

Gartner estimates that $5.26 trillion will be spent on all kinds of supplies globally in 2024, up 7.5% from a year ago and partly due to what it describes as a “tax on AI”: new technology means new spending. Omnea cites figures that the average duration of a procurement process is six months, involving up to 11 stakeholders in an organization.

Omnea’s answer to all of the above is an all-in-one AI-powered platform to help triage requests and improve how they are responded to, while removing some of the fragmentation that has developed around purchases. Software renewals are contextualized with feedback from current users, which is taken into account when evaluating a product and negotiating price; software requests are routed to the right teams to be compared to what already exists within the organization; A supplier portal provides an easier way to onboard and work with suppliers.

“It’s about managing soup to nuts, all the services, goods and products I need from the moment I decide I want them, to managing their annual renewal and managing suppliers and third-party providers,” Sonali De Rycker, partner at Accel, said in an interview.

Longer term, questions remain about how procurement fits into the broader suite of back-office tools a business uses. Right now, back office is an area dominated by big players like SAP, Workday, Salesforce, and Microsoft, all of which are candidates to become partners, but just as easily competitors to Omnea. On a more positive note, it speaks to the opportunity that currently presents itself.

Accel led the Series A, with participation also from First Round Capital and Point Nine, who jointly led the seed. Other investors in Omnea include David Clarke (the former CTO of Workday), Claire Hughes Johnson (the former COO of Stripe), and Anne Raimondi (COO of Asana).