He Raised ~$75 Million To Build An AI-Native Procurement Platform That Automates And Streamlines The Entire Buying Process For Businesses
Ben Freeman’s story is not one of overnight success or neatly plotted career moves. It is a story of friction—between old-economy instincts and venture-scale ambition, between external validation and internal conviction, and between momentum and meaning.
What makes Ben’s journey compelling is not just where he landed with Omnea, but how deliberately he learned what not to build, how to build, and when to walk away.
Growing Up Between Countryside and Commerce
Ben was raised in Cheshire, in the British countryside just outside Manchester, a place defined more by space, nature, and traditional industry than by venture capital or hypergrowth startups.
Ben grew up appreciating hard work, tangible businesses, and the idea that companies should make money, treat people well, and stand on solid foundations. His home was close to Manchester, which he thinks has a similar energy to London—just on a smaller scale..
Manchester, with its roots in retail, manufacturing, and heavy industry, instilled a “proper business” mindset from an early age. Tech, venture capital, and Silicon Valley playbooks were not part of the conversation. That would come much later. What was present early, however, was a relentless drive.
Ben’s entrepreneurial spirit was obvious at a young age: as a teenager, he was already finding small opportunities—trading vehicle number plates, selling whatever he could, and quickly learning that initiative can make effort go further.
Ben’s father, a lawyer, reinforced discipline and work ethic, even if the expected path was law rather than entrepreneurship. Ben absorbed the values, but chose a different outlet.
Dropping Out, Building Early, and Learning the Hard Way
Ben’s first real business came immediately after high school as an events company. He dropped out of school to pursue it full-time and ran Freesha Limited for over four years. Financially, it worked, and operationally, it scaled. But, personally, it was exhausting and eye-opening.
Ben learned that you have to select a business to build based to a great extent on the market and its scope. The theory that entrepreneurs should follow their passion, do what they understand, and solve problems they face, didn’t hold much value.
Young founders lacking experience would find that principle incredibly limiting. For instance, a young person could never start a B2B SaaS company. Then again, a founder aspiring to solve problems for corporates would need experience with how corporates operate.
Running an events business meant dealing with risk in its rawest form. One formative lesson came from discovering that outsourced door security often had conflicting incentives, sometimes tied to gangs or side deals.
Rather than accept the risk, Ben internalized security operations and built a parallel security business to regain control. That experience taught him something foundational: trust is not abstract; it is operational. If you do not control critical functions, you inherit hidden risk.
But the biggest lesson was more strategic than tactical. The events business was simply a bad market. Even the most successful operators in that industry created a limited economic impact compared to mid-tier tech companies, given the magnitude of their businesses.
Ben realized that talent and effort cannot overcome market constraints. You can put brilliant people into a stagnant or structurally capped market, and the outcome will never be transformative. That insight stayed with him.
Ben advises founders to choose a market that is big enough and growing quickly. That’s the first step in creating the impact they want to have on that market, society, economy, and people.
Education, London, and Rejecting Linear Careers
Ben briefly enrolled at the University of Warwick to study accounting and finance, but left after three and a half weeks—not for lack of ability, but because he wanted to be all-in on building, preferring to learn by doing versus spending time in classrooms and exam cycles.
Ben felt that entrepreneurship resonated deeply with him more than academics. Most of his friends were doing banking and consulting, but Ben realized that he was doing well financially. However, considering the problems he was handling with Freesha, he knew it wasn’t a long-term career.
Eventually, Ben returned to university, this time in London, choosing King’s College for culture and flexibility rather than league tables. He ran his events business throughout university, commuting constantly between Manchester and London, working 40 to 50 hours a week.
London changed his exposure, and here, Ben tried his hand at investment banking. Having graduated from university, he considered banking or consulting and applied to McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Eventually, Ben joined Lazard, believing boutique investment banking could offer prestige while providing entrepreneurial exposure. Within three months, he knew it was wrong. The work did not play to his strengths, the growth curve was linear, and the upside felt capped.
That realization pushed him back toward building his next company. Still carrying his old economy mindset from Manchester, Ben considered starting an alcohol brand, and explored options for pivoting the Freesha Limited business model.
Tessian: Learning Venture, Scale, and Sacrifice
Ben continued exploring his options and looking for his next venture. The turning point came when he met Tim Sadler and joined the early team at what was then called CheckRecipient, a barely formed startup that would become Tessian.
What drew Ben in was not the product or the polish, but the people. The founding team, comprising Tim Sadler (CEO), Ed Bishop (CTO), and Tom Adams, was smart, ambitious, and had real opportunity costs. They could have stayed in banking, but they chose to build.
At Tessian, Ben learned the venture-backed SaaS model from the inside: seed rounds, hypergrowth, enterprise sales, and eventually raising over $130M from top-tier investors. In retrospect, he considers the whole stint was a valuable learning experience, a perfect stepping stone.
Ben worked as though the business were his own. Post-Series B — as Tessian scaled rapidly and raised from marquee investors like Sequoia Capital — experienced executives were brought in, and governance changed.
Ben increasingly disagreed with the direction, and his sense of ownership eroded. When he moved to New York, the pressure intensified. He pushed himself too hard, burned out, and fell into a prolonged depression.
Eventually, with transparency and respect, he planned his exit. Tessian had been a remarkable company, but if Ben was going to build again, it had to be bigger, cleaner, and truer to his principles.
The Long Search for the Right Problem
What followed was one of the hardest phases of Ben’s career. For over a year and a half, he explored relentlessly, researching dozens of ideas. He examined roll-ups, traditional businesses, manufacturing plays, and multiple tech startups. He nearly launched a premium ice manufacturing company.
Ben even had term sheets for ventures he ultimately walked away from. Valuations during COVID didn’t click. This was not indecision; it was a disqualification. Having learned how much market selection matters, he raised his bar.
Why Procurement—and Why Omnea
The seed of Omnea came from pain Ben personally experienced. As he explains, Tessian is an enterprise email security provider with top clients, including most of the world's leading investment banks, law firms, and several tech companies.
Selling enterprise email security at Tessian exposed Ben to procurement — and he hated it. The process was fragmented, manual, and adversarial. In Ben’s view, the procurement teams were set up to fail with poor systems and misaligned incentives.
At the same time, Ben noticed macro forces converging on the procurement space and related those to similar trends he had seen influence the infosec space in 2017, where Tessian operated.
Back then the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) drove cybersecurity into the spotlight, providing a perfect ‘why now’ for Tessian.
With Omnea, Ben saw the increased drive for capital efficiency (due to increasing interest rates), rising governance and risk scrutiny, and the maturation of AI would put procurement into the spotlight..
Omnea’s Model: Simplicity Over Extraction
By the time Ben committed to Omnea, he had already spent over a year validating the space. His conviction was earned before the company even existed. When he finally moved, there was no hesitation. By this time, he had developed a solid foundation for understanding its potential.
Omnea is enterprise software, but with a deliberate rejection of complexity where it hurts customers most: pricing. Rather than usage-based chaos or opaque license structures, Omnea prices are simply based on company size and integrations.
As Ben explains in detail, Omnea has disrupted the traditional pricing model prevalent in the market. They explore their client company’s needs and evaluate its headcount. Next, they ask about the integrations the client needs and quote an annual fee.
This fee is not usage-based or tied to expensive admin licenses, unlike some incumbent platforms. Customers know what they will pay. AI agents and automation are embedded, not monetized opportunistically. Agentic processes are part of the platform and are not charged separately.
In Ben’s view, enterprises do not want surprise invoices. They want predictability. That philosophy extends to fundraising.
Fundraising as a Rite of Passage, Not a Scorecard
Omnea has raised roughly $75M, but Ben is explicit. In his view, raising capital is not success. Having lived through excess at Tessian and watched COVID-era valuations collapse, he sees fundraising as a tool, not validation.
Storytelling is everything that Ben Freeman was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted.
Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.
As Ben points out, benchmarks and reality matter. At some point, markets correct. Rather than maximizing valuation, Omnea has focused on staying sensible and grounded, raising when justified, and learning to do more with less. Adopting the lean operational strategy is an advantage.
Ben believes this discipline compounds into long-term advantage, especially when cycles turn. Omnea has been fortunate to elicit investor interest before actively seeking capital.
The Vision: Procurement as a Competitive Advantage
Ben’s ambition for Omnea is expansive but precise. He wants Omnea to become the default system for all supplier-related activities. If an employee needs to hire a contractor, sponsor a conference booth, or purchase software, Omnea should be the intuitive place they go.
Users can take advantage of the conversational intake driven by AI, where they can chat, describe their requirements, and get options, making the process entirely seamless.
Behind the scenes, AI routes contracts to legal, flags risks, manages approvals, issues purchase orders, and ensures payment, all without friction.
The deeper vision is more strategic. Ben cites an analogy to explain. Companies divert extensive resources toward recruiting, retaining, and managing their employees and team members. But when it comes to sourcing, managing, choosing, and paying their suppliers, they need more efficiency.
Current systems are totally disjointed, and Omnea is the solution that companies need. Procurement and supply management, when done well, can become a competitive advantage rather than a bottleneck.
Hiring: Obsession, Not Compromise
People remain Ben’s non-negotiable. At Omnea, the hiring bar is intentionally extreme. An “8 out of 10” candidate is not enough. The process is intensive and designed to surface misalignment early. If someone drops out along the way, that is a feature, not a bug.
Ben believes that talent density compounds and that it is better to stay small and exceptional than to scale prematurely with mediocrity.
Advice to His Younger Self: Stop Worrying, Start Iterating
If Ben could give his younger self one piece of advice, it would not be tactical. It would be this: Worrying is wasted energy. You cannot predict outcomes. You can only increase learning speed. Build the thing. Discover it is wrong. Move on faster. Stress does not substitute for progress.
Looking back, Ben sees that many of his hardest moments, such as dropping out, walking away, and starting again, only make sense in hindsight. The dots connect later. The only constant is motion.
And for Ben Freeman, that willingness to keep moving with intention, discipline, and conviction has made all the difference.
Market selection is destiny, because talent and effort cannot compensate for a structurally capped industry. · “Follow your passion” is limiting when you’re young, since you can’t solve problems you don’t yet understand or have access to. · Trust is operational because if you don’t control critical functions, you inherit hidden risks and incentives. · Linear prestige paths (banking/consulting) aren’t worth it if you can’t be world-class and the upside is capped. · Omnea won by choosing simplicity over extraction, using predictable pricing and embedding AI without turning customers into variable-cost experiments. · The compounding edge is discipline—raise capital as a tool, hire with an extreme bar, and iterate fast rather than waste energy worrying.
@nick.b@omnea.co I've made a bit of a mess of this but I think it's ok. Feel free to rewrite this section if you like
Original Version
Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker show. So today we have an amazing founder, you know, i founder that, you know, it's unbelievable this story. You know, we're going be, you know, talking about the building, the financing, the the scaling, I mean, all all of that good stuff that we like to hear.
Alejandro Cremades: And I think that today you're going find the conversation quite inspiring. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Ben Freeman. Welcome to the show.
Alejandro Cremades: So originally born there in Manchester, you know near near Manchester, sorry, there in England. So give us a walk through memory e lane. How was life growing up for you?
Ben Freeman: yeah So I was actually born in Cheshire. That's where I was brought up, which is about half an hour of Manchester. It's basically, if you've not been, it's kind of British countryside, particularly our was brought up. So lots of space around me. So a very pleasant place to be brought up.
Ben Freeman: You know, that's why I love nature and animals today. But you're near enough to Manchester to understand big cities and what's that, what that's like. um And it's kind of a warm up to London. You know, it's like a smaller, slightly beta version um if you look at kind of the businesses and the way the economy works there so i love my upbringing and then i i moved to london to study initially but kept my business in manchester so lots of traveling for me in the earlier years
Alejandro Cremades: And also lots of ideas, lots of projects. You know, even before you turn 18, you were quite the entrepreneur. what what do you What do you think that drive comes from for you?
Ben Freeman: yeah it's an interesting one because i honestly as a kid i think i was just obsessed with money i remember being like I don't know when it started, probably like 11 or 12, but I just thought it was really cool to try and get rich. I'd say that's faded over time. Like now the reasons I do things are less about money and there are other parameters you consider, right? But in my earlier years, I just liked hustling and trying to make some money. So I was always selling stuff or doing stuff.
Ben Freeman: I think my dad probably ingrained that into me to some degree. He believed in hard work, like he he's a lawyer, so he he thought I should be a lawyer, but more importantly, he taught me work ethic. But I chose to do that for kind of ways that could, at the time, make me money, whatever that meant.
Ben Freeman: And it was weirdly, being from kind of Manchester, the businesses are more traditional businesses. you know A lot of people are in retail or heavy industry. This whole tech and venture backed thing was totally new to me when I moved to London. like i have I was clueless at the time. So that meant I i was brought up believing in kind of like proper businesses in inverted commas, you know, like you have to make a profit.
Ben Freeman: You have to look after people a certain way. So I kind of came from a slightly different background that I've then tried to bring into tech.
Alejandro Cremades: That's amazing. Now, we'll talk about that in just a little bit. Now, one thing that it will be awesome, you know, because on day on the first real business, you know, you dropped out of school. It was this events business.
Alejandro Cremades: I think that it will be awesome, you know, to really understand what was the biggest takeaway or the biggest lesson that you learned from from that business.
Ben Freeman: Oh, yeah, there's a lot. And this was many years ago now. So the story there is i so I finished high school and I'd done some side hustles throughout. I was trading vehicle number plates and all sorts of things to kind of make money here and there. um And then my first proper business, as I describe it, was in the summer after I graduated from high school. And it was this events company.
Ben Freeman: And I ended up doing that for quite a few years. um And it kind of, suppose what did I learn from it? Look, we got to a decent scale in many ways. The main thing I learned is that you have to select the business you build to a great degree based on the market and what it can become. Because a lot of people tell you, you know, follow your passions or do what you understand, solve problems you know.
Ben Freeman: That's incredibly limiting if you don't know that much. You know, i was young and you you'd never start a B2B SaaS company, right? If you're solving problems for corporates. I didn't know what corporate was. So like, you know, I think back then I was trying to solve problems I understood.
Ben Freeman: There were so many learnings because at the time I was employing I mean, I'll give you a couple of stories, but I was i was like employing people much older than me. And one problem I had, for example, was when you run different events, you have to run the doors. You know you need bouncers or doormen to keep your events secure.
Ben Freeman: And it turns out if you go to companies, those doormen have deals with the local drug dealers or gangs. So they let certain people in and they're controlling your door and they might be making some money on the side. If you're not in control of that, you face risk.
Ben Freeman: There could be violence that you don't see coming or they could take the money or whatever. So I ended up doing that in-house. We built a security company as well. And you know I made a little margin on the the the doorman I was kind of renting out. So I kind of realized quite yeah young the importance of trust and working with people that you can kind of get on with.
Ben Freeman: And it was a weird way to learn the lesson. But because I was young and probably looked quite exploitable, I actually think I was looking back. I think I was quite savvy. And like I looked young. And at the time, like for Manchester, I was basically like a posh kid in Manchester. But probably a lot of people were trying to screw me over. And so that was a lesson. But yeah, the main lesson, if I have to choose one, is just that it was a shit market.
Ben Freeman: If you look at the most successful events company owners in the world, the magnitude of their businesses or the you know the scale of the wealth they create for other people and the economy in general is so much smaller than if you look at even a mid-tier tech company. So I just think there's an element of like choosing your market, decide the impact you want to have on that market, on society, on the economy, on people. And you know you can put smart people in a shit market and the the outcome is not going to inspiring.
Alejandro Cremades: I mean, I think that you're right on. I think that for founders listening to like choosing a market that is big enough, choosing a market that also is growing at a really nice rate, it makes all the difference. yeah And that's really where magic happens, where you're able to plug in an awesome team. I guess for you to, you know, like right after this, you ended up a moving to London for university. I mean, you have great schools in Manchester. You know, why why going all the way to London? why what What got you there?
Ben Freeman: Yeah, well actually I didn't the first time. So I went to, I never tell this part of the story, but I went to Warwick University to study accounting and finance for all of three and a half weeks. And then I dropped out and I just, at the time I wasn't ready to really be back in education. are so bored of doing exams. i'm I'm deeply competitive. So if I'm going to do an exam, I want to come top and I've never got less than an A. So I'm not that smart, but I like, I'll work hard and I'll get the grade.
Ben Freeman: um I just couldn't be arsed going through that process again, jumping straight back into uni. I'd chosen Warwick because it was number one for accounting and finance that year in the kind of league tables or whatever. And that was the, you know, I suppose it wasn't a deeply thought out decision. And I quickly got there and thought, fuck this. I want to be doing business stuff. I want to be making money.
Ben Freeman: I just felt entrepreneurship resonated with me way more. It was just scary because as I mentioned, my dad's a lawyer. I ah kind of brought up in a way that that looks like a failure or like, you know, you're supposed to do a clever thing. Most of my mates were doing banking or consulting or law or whatever else. um So yeah, so i I dropped out of that, I kept the business. And then when I, that first year of running the events company, I realized, okay, I'm doing quite well, like financially i was doing okay, I had good people, i was like, you know, there was there was some good with it, but I realized this wasn't gonna be my career. Like the problems I was dealing with,
Ben Freeman: the violence, the drugs, the issues you have running events company. I was like, I'm selling myself short here. So I then realized to go I should go back to uni, but I didn't want to stop the business. So the next time I applied to uni, I only applied to London universities um because I thought I need like an upgrade from Manchester.
Ben Freeman: So I was either going to go abroad or go to London, but I wanted to keep my events company, which I ran the whole way through university. My offices were in Manchester, so it was very busy between London and Manchester. So I ended up getting into lsc which is one could argue better than King's academically.
Ben Freeman: But I realized I liked the culture of King's. I like the people. I really liked the course. I was basically studying management and part of me also thought I need to keep this business running.
Ben Freeman: I'm working probably, don't know, 40, 50 hours a week when it's busy on that and I'll have studying and presumably have to revise. So that was kind of my framework for the decision. And yeah, I wanted an upgrade on Manchester and London felt like that at the time.
Alejandro Cremades: So you went to London, on then you tried a little bit of investment banking. You know were also exploring what could be essentially another startup that you could do, another business that you could do. But you ended up joining another startup.
Alejandro Cremades: So walk us through the motions there, through the sequence of events, because obviously joining this other company, Tessian, was quite pivotal no because it was the most immediate step possible.
Alejandro Cremades: for you to get to to to get started with with with your baby now, with Omnea, which is a smashing success. So walk us through what happened.
Ben Freeman: Yeah, so back then, so I got out of this events business, ran it for like four or four four and a half years or something, did quite well in the sense I'd made a bit of money, I'd like put myself through university and you know, i was like, I was doing all right.
And I think that mindset to life just makes me a happier person. Hopefully a more successful person as well when it comes to business.
But I think as I’m getting older now and I’m seeing the next generation of entrepreneurs come — I’m the “young guy” — and now people ask me stuff as if I have answers…
All this stress and worrying that people put pressure on themselves — it’s not always the most productive way to get to an outcome.
Being intentional about where you allocate the energy — that’s really spectacular.
Ben, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi and also learn more about Omnia, what’s the best way for them to do so?
They can email me, I suppose — Ben.f@Omnea.co — or get us on LinkedIn.
Easy enough. Thank you so much for being on the Dealmaker Show today.
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So also remember that if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at alejandro at panthera advisors dot com.
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