Omnea, a London and New York-based company that helps businesses manage supplier and vendor spend, announced a new employee program on June 30, 2026: any employee who reaches five years of tenure can pitch their next startup idea in a single 30-minute meeting with CEO Ben Freeman and Firedrop founder Pietro Invernizzi, and receive a decision within 24 hours. Approved pitches get a $250,000 check, guided at roughly a $10 million valuation (about 2.5% equity) or an uncapped, discountless SAFE priced at the company's next major round.
The program goes beyond capital: Omnea offers office space, operational support and coaching from its own executive team, plus a formal partnership with Firedrop, a European angel fund, giving prospective founders access to a network of more than 150 angel investors and operators — including alumni from Stripe, Asana and Wise. The intent, according to Freeman, is for the $250,000 check to function as a founder's genuine first check, covering both early product development and personal salary during the pre-seed period.
Freeman built the program based on his own experience at Tessian, the email security company, where former colleagues went on to found ElevenLabs, Maze, Tracebit and Platformed without any formal backing or blessing from their prior employer. "Somebody wants to start a business, but they can't tell their employer, so they're awkwardly trying side hustles," Freeman said, describing the dynamic he wants Omnea's program to eliminate entirely. "If people are going to build a business, they're going to build a business" regardless of whether their employer supports it — so Omnea's bet is that formalizing and funding that instinct, rather than fighting it, is better for everyone involved.
“Four employees have already signaled intent to use the program, including two repeat founders and two first-time entrepreneurs.”
As of the program's launch, no employee has formally used it yet, since Omnea — roughly 200 employees — is only now approaching its first cohort with five years of tenure. Four employees have already signaled intent to use the program, including two repeat founders and two first-time entrepreneurs.
The model draws an explicit parallel to consulting firms like McKinsey, whose dense alumni networks have quietly incubated a disproportionate share of major company founders over decades — Freeman's bet is that a tech company can engineer that same alumni effect deliberately rather than waiting for it to emerge organically over a much longer timeline. It also reflects a broader shift in how growth-stage companies think about retention: rather than only rewarding employees who stay indefinitely, Omnea is explicitly subsidizing well-timed, well-supported departures as a way to build long-term goodwill and an extended talent network.
For founders and operators designing retention and culture programs, Omnea's approach is a genuinely novel data point: funding your own future competitors (or future customers, or future co-investors) may generate more long-term value than trying to prevent departures altogether. For LPs and angels, a formalized, well-capitalized pipeline of vetted, first-time founders emerging from a single company with real operating experience is exactly the kind of dealflow angel networks like Firedrop are built to capture early.
What to watch: whether any of the four employees who've signaled intent actually launch companies through the program in the coming months, whether the startups that emerge perform better than typical first-time founder outcomes given the built-in support network, and whether other growth-stage companies adopt similar formalized 'future founder' programs as a retention and goodwill strategy.