Procurement has to be one of the more frustrating, dry, yet inevitable aspects of a workplace, wherein the process involves requesting, vetting, and eventually buying IT and other supplies.

If you need a new app or device, and perhaps a new contract for something in your daily life, then you just do so. At work? You probably know what you want, but getting it isn't so simple. There are budgets, management signoffs, pre-existing IT contracts, security vetting, price negotiations, and more that make it more complicated.

A UK startup out of London, called Omnea, has built a platform to reduce that pain, and is today announcing that it has raised $25 million in funding to expand-a $20 million series A and a $5 million seed round that it's announcing for the first time today.

Omnea is not disclosing its valuation. You wouldn't expect it to, given the startup's mission of arming businesses with everything they need to maintain the upper hand in price negotiations. Still, as an indicator of why investors are backing the company, revenues, Omnea reports, increased eightfold last year for its list of customers that includes McAfee, Onfido, Proofpoint, Podimo, Robin AI, Sana, and Typeform.

Omnea has been co-founded by two former senior executives of the cybersecurity company Tessian, who have experienced firsthand how sticky the procurement process can be from both inside - at one's own company - and outside as a vendor to other businesses.

"We sold email security to mid-sized and large businesses, to everybody," said Freeman, the CEO. "Our buyers used to dread involving procurement. They used to literally do all the demos, go through all the stages and and then at the end, there'd be this poor procurement guy, or whoever it is, thrown in at the 11th hour."

This last-minute person sat down to negotiate price, but it became pretty evident that this deal just wasn't ever going to unfold in favor of the buyer because of a lack of knowledge and understanding. "They weren't brought in early enough to negotiate," Freeman said. This mindset then, either the deal is going to not pan out, or it's just going to get nodded through, neither are good endings.

Omnea is undertaking an enormous task, arguably one that has crept up on the unsuspecting world of work.

 PROCUREMENT used to be just another department in a business, stamping or rejecting but usually stamping requests to pay for something new — particularly in smaller companies or at least companies with smaller technology footprints.

These days, that process has undergone a drastic change, thanks to the complexity of the paperless office.

Software is bought as a service and almost everything — even notepad — is sold in the shape of software. Or, that notepad comes in the form of hardware which now needs regular refreshes.

All the software and hardware intermingle via The Cloud, and you get a spaghetti effect of many things that work together but may also conflict and overlap with each other. Cue security and IT issues.

Gartner predicts $5.26 trillion will be spent worldwide on all forms of procurement in 2024, up 7.5% from last year and partly driven by what it describes as an "AI tax": new tech means new spend. Omnea says that figures estimate the average time for a procurement process is six months and involves up to 11 stakeholders within an organization.

Omnea's response to all of the above is to have a one-stop shop driven by AI that will help triage requests and improve on how to respond, but also eradicate some of the fragmentation that has grown up around procurement. Software renewals are contextualized with feedback from current users, factored in when evaluating a product and price negotiation; software requests routed to the proper teams to consider against what already exists within the organization; supplier portal provides an easier way to onboard and work with vendors. It's really about managing soup to nuts all of the services and goods and products that I need, from the time I decide that I want them all the way through managing their annual renewal and kind of vendor management and third-party supplier management," Sonali De Rycker, a partner at Accel, explained in an interview.

Long term, there is the question of where procurement fits into the wider picture of back office solutions that a business applies. Today, the back office is pretty much an ecosystem dominated by players such as SAP, Workday, Salesforce and Microsoft -- any one of whom could be a potential partner but equally potentially a competitor to companies like Omnea. More positively, that tells one of the nature of the opportunity as it exists today.

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