Omnea tops the Startups 100 having met its Series A hiring target

On 12 January Startups.co.uk named Omnea, a London-based maker of procurement software, first in its 2026 Startups 100 Index. The index, now in its 18th year and sponsored by Sage, ranks businesses founded in the past five years. The release announcing it said Omnea had grown revenue fivefold and tripled its headcount since 2024. It gave no starting figure for either.

Omnea Limited was incorporated at Companies House on 24 January 2022. Ben Freeman, its chief executive, co-founded it with Ben Allen. Freeman had been US general manager and head of international growth at Tessian, the cybersecurity company Proofpoint bought in 2023, and the company says it was there that he experienced the procurement problems Omnea now sells against. In its profile of the winner, Startups.co.uk reports that Freeman interviewed 300 procurement leaders before building the product.

Omnea sits between the employee who wants to buy something and the finance, legal, IT and risk teams that must approve it. Requests come in through a single front door, written in plain language. The platform routes them to the right approvers, onboards new suppliers with compliance checks, tracks contracts and renewals, and keeps one record of every supplier a business uses. It does not replace purchase-to-pay software: the company’s 2024 funding release placed it alongside Coupa, SAP Ariba and NetSuite’s procurement modules.

The release also shows Omnea meeting a target it set itself. When Omnea raised its Series A in October 2024, it said it would use the money to triple its headcount by the end of 2025. Fifteen months later the index release reports that headcount has tripled since 2024. According to Startups.co.uk, the founders now see Omnea leading a new category, AI supplier relationship management (AI SRM), that would do for supplier data what customer relationship management (CRM) software did for customer data.

Funding that followed the growth

Omnea’s $5m (£3.7m) seed round, led by First Round Capital and Point Nine, was not made public until its Series A on 14 October 2024. That $20m (£14.8m) round was led by Accel, whose partner Sonali De Rycker said she had got to know Freeman through Accel’s early investment in Tessian. Angel investors included David Clarke, a former CTO of Workday, and Claire Hughes Johnson, a former chief operating officer of Stripe. Omnea said then that its revenue had grown eightfold over the previous year.

On 17 September 2025 the company announced a $50m (£37m) Series B led by Insight Partners and Khosla Ventures, with Accel, Point Nine, First Round Capital and Prosus also investing. Total funding passed $75m (£55.5m). Omnea said revenue had grown fivefold and headcount had more than tripled in the previous 12 months. Jeff Lieberman, managing director at Insight Partners, said in the announcement: “Of the many players we looked at in the market, Omnea had the happiest customers out there.”

Customers that sign off spend

Its named customers are mostly large businesses. In the year before the Series B, Omnea added Spotify, Albertsons, Wise, Adecco and MongoDB as customers, according to the company. Its 2024 release named AlphaSights, McAfee, Onfido and TeamViewer. Ben Kung, vice-president of finance at Spotify, said in the Series B announcement that Omnea’s automation “can replace fragmented systems, endless email threads, and manual spreadsheets”.

Freeman told Startups.co.uk that Omnea has saved customers more than 100,000 hours of manual work and that one client had cut its average cycle time from 40 days to 15, without naming the client. Those figures are Omnea’s own and cannot be checked from outside.

Freeman’s case for the category rests on what procurement already holds. “Businesses hold a treasure trove of supplier data, but its value is locked away in spreadsheets, inboxes and siloed point solutions,” he said in September 2025. The product’s job, as he describes it, is to flag expired certifications for risk teams, launch requests for proposals for procurement and send reports to CFOs from the same record.

A crowded market, a different claim

Omnea does not claim to have invented the idea. “We weren’t first to market, so we had to be best to market,” Freeman told Startups.co.uk. Its leadership includes two of Freeman’s former Tessian colleagues, according to the Series B announcement: Sabrina Castiglione, its CFO, and Abhirukt Sapru, its chief commercial officer.

Startups.co.uk says it judges entrants with specialist industry consultants and charges no fee for entry or inclusion. Omnea’s public record shows three disclosed funding rounds from established investors, named enterprise customers and a hiring target set in 2024 and reported met by January 2026. What a ranking cannot measure is the category bet: whether finance teams will treat supplier data as a system in its own right, rather than as part of the purchase-to-pay software Omnea sits beside.

Almost four years after incorporation, Omnea has met the hiring target it set at its Series A and has signed businesses the size of Spotify and Albertsons. On the evidence published by 12 January, it is a fast-growing procurement platform with enterprise customers, and AI SRM remains the company’s own name for the market it wants to lead.