Ben Freeman spent his early career fixing the same problem from two different sides. First as an executive at Tessian, watching procurement swallow six months and eleven stakeholders before anyone could buy anything. Then as a founder, building the thing he'd wished existed the whole time.
That thing is Omnea. In January 2026, it was named the UK's number one startup in the Startups 100 Index beating 99 other companies, in the index's 18th year, for turning one of the most unglamorous problems in business software into the country's most-watched growth story. This piece answers the question everyone ends up asking after reading that headline: how does Omnea make money, and what's actually being sold underneath the award?
Quick answer: enterprise SaaS for an unsexy, unsolved problem
Omnea makes money by selling annual enterprise software subscriptions to companies that need to manage how they buy, vet, and renew relationships with suppliers. Founded in 2022 by Ben Freeman and Ben Allen, it's an AI-native procurement orchestration platform used by enterprises including Spotify, MongoDB, and Adecco. There's no consumer angle, no marketplace take-rate, no advertising, just enterprise software, sold on contract, solving a problem finance and procurement teams have quietly hated for years.
That's the short version of how Omnea makes money. But what is Omnea, more precisely? It's the system that sits between an employee wanting to buy something and the six or seven people who traditionally had to sign off on it replaced with one AI-driven "front door." Understanding what Omnea actually does is the key to understanding the Omnea business model underneath it: this is infrastructure a company licenses, not a service it pays for per use.
Why procurement was still broken in 2026
Omnea cites Gartner research suggesting procurement processes can take around six months and involve up to eleven stakeholders, according to figures Omnea cites from Gartner. Gartner separately estimated $5.26 trillion would be spent on procurement globally in 2024, up 7.5% year-on-year, partly attributed to an "AI tax," as businesses bought new tools to keep pace with AI adoption.
Freeman has told Startups.co.uk he interviewed 300 procurement leaders while researching the idea, and all of them said the same thing: their process was hated, their tools were clunky, and they wanted to do better but the existing stack held them back. Too many stakeholders meant no one owned the decision. No shared source of truth meant supplier data lived in scattered spreadsheets and inboxes. And slow, resented workflows pushed employees to bypass procurement altogether, creating shadow IT and unmanaged supplier risk. That's the gap Omnea built into: not a lack of software, but a glut of the wrong kind.
The product: a single AI "front door" for supplier requests
Omnea works by giving every employee one conversational entry point via Teams, Slack, or a natural-language request that routes automatically to the right people in finance, legal, IT, or risk. From there, no-code workflows and automated approvals move the request along, while a reinforcement-learning layer gets smarter with every decision it processes, according to Omnea's own product description.
This is also where what is Omnea used for gets a concrete answer: the platform is built around three things working together procurement orchestration and automation at the front end, third-party risk management replacing manual due-diligence cycles, and spend control through a single, queryable source of truth for supplier data across the business. Every decision is logged and auditable, and Omnea states it holds zero data retention agreements with its model providers, a detail aimed squarely at the enterprise buyers most anxious about AI and data governance.
The Omnea business model: contracts, not clicks
Omnea's business model runs on annual subscription contracts rather than per-transaction fees, with pricing that varies by company size and requirements, according to Gartner Peer Insights. That's the core mechanic behind how Omnea makes money in practice: the platform offers tiered plans and custom enterprise pricing on request, a structure common across enterprise SaaS, where the value metric is the contract, not the individual purchase moving through the system.
Omnea hasn't published exact pricing, and the company hasn't disclosed its valuation either, according to TechCrunch's coverage of its Series A. What is clear is the growth this Omnea business model has supported: revenue grew eightfold in the year before its October 2024 Series A, then a further fivefold in the twelve months before its 2026 Startups 100 win, with headcount more than tripling over the same period, per Omnea's own funding announcements.
From Fortune 500 pilots to a Startups 100 win
Omnea won the 2026 Startups 100 Index by proving its AI-first approach could save enterprise customers real, measurable time over 100,000 hours of manual work, in Freeman's words to Startups.co.uk. The results, by his account, were concrete: one client cut its average cycle time from 40 days to 15, another reduced new access requests by a third, and a third now captures 70% of supplier risks automatically through Omnea's AI.
The client list has scaled with the funding: from early names like McAfee, Onfido, and TeamViewer at Series A, to Spotify, MongoDB, Albertsons, and Adecco by 2026. Startups.co.uk editor Zohra Huda summed up the judges' reasoning plainly: by taking the slog out of supplier lifecycle and spend control, Omnea frees enterprises up to focus on being entrepreneurial rather than administrative precisely the kind of "boring problem, huge market" logic that tends to win over both customers and judges.
$75m raised — and what Series B is funding
Omnea has raised $75 million across three funding rounds since 2022, taking it from a five-person idea to a company competing for enterprise budgets against SAP and Coupa.
Accel, Point Nine, First Round Capital, and Prosus all returned to participate in the Series B. The round is funding the next phase of what Omnea calls its AI Supplier Relationship Management (AI SRM) vision expanding hiring across the US and UK and scaling the orchestration layer that keeps its single source of truth for vendor data continuously refreshed. Insight Partners' Jeff Lieberman put the thesis simply: "Of the many players we looked at in the market, Omnea had the happiest customers out there."
Beyond the product roadmap, this funding is also where Omnea's business model touches its people directly. In June 2026 it launched the Omnea Future Founders Fund with angel fund Firedrop, offering employees with five years' service up to $250,000 to launch their own startups, a retention play as much as a founder-support one.
FAQs
1. How does Omnea make money?Omnea makes money through annual enterprise software subscriptions, sold to companies that need to manage procurement, supplier risk, and spend control. Pricing is tiered and customised by company size, per Gartner Peer Insights, rather than charged per transaction.
2. How much funding has Omnea raised?Omnea has raised $75 million in total: a $5 million seed round, a $20 million Series A in October 2024 led by Accel, and a $50 million Series B in September 2025 led by Insight Partners and Khosla Ventures.
3. What is Omnea used for?Omnea is used to automate the full supplier lifecycle request intake, approvals, sourcing, third-party risk checks, and renewals replacing the emails and spreadsheets that traditionally slowed enterprise procurement down.
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Conclusion
Omnea's story is really two stories in one. There's the product story an AI-native platform that replaced procurement's tangle of emails and spreadsheets with a single front door, and got named the UK's top startup for it. And there's the quieter, more instructive one for founders: the business model behind it didn't chase novelty. Omnea sold enterprise licences, priced by company size, to businesses that were already spending trillions on procurement and getting little for it.
That discipline is the real answer to how Omnea makes money, not the AI itself, but the decision to build something companies sign an annual contract for, rather than something they dip into occasionally. It's proof that the least exciting line item in a company's software stack is sometimes the biggest opportunity in the room, if someone finally builds the version people actually want to use.
Sources: Data drawn from Startups.co.uk's 2026 Startups 100 Index coverage, TechCrunch, Omnea's own press releases and product pages, Gartner Peer Insights, PitchBook, and Crunchbase News. Figures reflect the most recent available data at the time of writing.
The EP+ Editorial Desk covers UK startups, founder stories, and venture capital. All editorial content is independently produced and human-reviewed before publication.
