- Replaces the outsourced labour and creaking software stack that enterprises rely on to audit and pay invoices across their supply chains with AI agents that run the entire workflow end-to-end.
- Freehand’s AI Agents autonomously manage supply-chain spend for Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Dunkin’, Pfizer and Cardinal Health Â
Freehand, an AI-native startup that deploys autonomous agents to manage supply-chain spend for the world’s largest enterprises, announced today it has raised $75 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners.
The round also drew participation from PSP Growth — the venture capital arm of former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker’s PSP Partners — along with Nexus Venture Partners and several other investors, bringing the company’s total funding to approximately $100 million.
The raise comes at a pivotal moment for global supply chains. American companies spend more than $20 trillion annually on the raw materials, logistics, data centres, and services that underpin the US economy, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
For decades, managing that spend has meant stitching together legacy software platforms with enormous teams of outsourced labor — a model now under intensifying pressure from tariffs, shifting immigration policies, and the rising cost and fragility of traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) arrangements.
Autonomous agents
Freehand’s proposition is both simple and ambitious: replace the outsourced labour and creaking software stack that enterprises rely on to audit and pay invoices across their supply chains with AI agents that run the entire workflow end-to-end.
These agents read contracts, negotiate rates with suppliers, identify leakage and overpayments, process payments, enforce compliance, and reconcile data across enterprise systems — all without human intervention in the loop.
The company emerged from stealth earlier this year and has already secured deployments at some of the most recognisable names in the Fortune 500, including Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’, and Cardinal Health.
Across these early engagements, customers have reported recovering 5–10 per cent of spend in notoriously complex categories, completing procurement workflows five to seven times faster, and slashing procure-to-pay cycle times by more than 70 per cent. The result is a dual dividend: organizations are redirecting their human talent toward higher-value strategic work while simultaneously winding down expensive outsourcing and BPO contracts.
“Freehand marks one of the first full-scale agentic deployments at Unilever and is an early anchor in the shift from software that assists to software that runs our supply chain,” said Matt Algar, Global VP of Supply Chain at Unilever.
Closing a $364b gap
The economics driving adoption are stark. Enterprises collectively spend roughly $16 billion per year on supply chain software licenses, yet they spend another $348 billion annually on the human labor required to do what that software cannot — manually bridging gaps between systems, chasing down discrepancies, and executing the countless micro-decisions that keep supply chains moving. Freehand was purpose-built to close that chasm.
“Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot,” said Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Freehand.
“We built Freehand to close that gap — with AI agents that decide, act, and take accountability for outcomes. This is the beginning of true autonomy in the enterprise.”
Jayakrishnan is no stranger to the supply chain technology landscape. He previously built and sold Pando, an enterprise SaaS platform focused on logistics, giving him a front-row seat to the limitations of conventional software approaches and the scale of the opportunity that autonomous agents could unlock.
“The very nature of work is changing with AI,” added Abhijeet Manohar, co-founder of Freehand. “Shifting from building software for the user to building software that is the user meant we could drive far deeper transformation for our customers. The difference between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests is context.”
Compounding intelligence engine
At the heart of Freehand’s platform lies what the company calls its Category Context Graph — a proprietary knowledge architecture that captures every decision, transaction, and exception across a given spend category.
The graph unifies unstructured data buried in contracts, emails, Slack messages, and supplier communications with the structured data residing in ERP systems, procurement platforms, and financial databases. The result is a rich, continuously updated situational model that gives each AI agent the contextual understanding of a tenured supply-chain expert, complete with a fully auditable trail explaining every decision made.
Crucially, the graph is not static. Every agent Freehand deploys both draws from and enriches it, creating what the company describes as a compounding intelligence effect: each action taken improves the accuracy, context awareness, and autonomy of the next. Over time, the system becomes not just more efficient but genuinely smarter — learning the idiosyncrasies of each spend category, supplier relationship, and organizational policy.
The investor syndicate behind the round reflects a conviction that Freehand represents something rarer than another AI wrapper: a vertically focused, applied-AI company delivering measurable, near-immediate ROI at some of the most demanding enterprises on the planet.
“In Freehand we found an applied-AI company with a vertical wedge and tremendous customer love, proven at some of the world’s largest companies where early signs of expansion were playing out,” said Dharmesh Thakker, General Partner at Battery Ventures, who is joining Freehand’s board.
“Unlike co-pilots that simply answer questions, Freehand’s agents have enterprise context, make decisions, and take actions — this agency unlocks millions in savings for enterprises.”
Gregoire Lehmann, partner at NewRoad Capital Partners, echoed that emphasis on tangible outcomes over technological novelty. “What stood out to us about Freehand wasn’t just the technology, but the measurable business outcomes customers were achieving,” Lehmann said.
“Freehand is delivering immediate ROI by helping enterprises reduce overpayments and operating costs, improve audit accuracy, and automate highly manual supply chain finance workflows. We believe the company is well positioned to become the category leader in AI-native supply chain spend management.”
Penny Pritzker, whose PSP Growth participated in the round, framed the investment in terms of national competitiveness. “America’s industrial competitiveness relies on how effectively our largest companies operate,” said Pritzker. “Freehand is one of a few companies converting frontier AI into measurable productivity gains across enterprise supply chains, with rigour, scale, and accountability.”