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 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.”

Omnea says its Series A funding round followed a year in which its revenue grew by a factor of eight. The company’s customer base now includes major tech firms such as McAfee Corp. and Proofpoint Inc., a cybersecurity provider that was taken private for $12.3 billion in 2021.

Photo: Omnea