Freehand has raised $75 million in funding to expand its autonomous AI platform for managing supply chain spending at large enterprises. The round was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from PSP Growth, Nexus Venture Partners and other investors.
Freehand recently emerged from stealth with deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’ and Cardinal Health.
The company develops AI agents that manage procurement, supplier relationships, invoice processing, payments and financial reconciliation across complex supply chain categories.
Freehand plans to use the funding to scale its technology and expand deployments with Fortune 500 companies seeking to reduce overpayments, operating expenses and reliance on outsourced business process providers.
Companies collectively spend trillions of dollars each year on raw materials, transportation, logistics, data center infrastructure and professional services. However, much of that spending continues to be managed using older software systems and large teams of outsourced workers.
Freehand is designed to replace portions of that infrastructure with autonomous AI teams capable of completing entire workflows rather than merely assisting employees with individual tasks.
The company’s agents can read contracts, compare invoices with negotiated terms, communicate with suppliers, identify spending leakage, process payments and send information back into procurement and financial systems.
Spending leakage can occur when a business pays prices that differ from its contracts, misses discounts, receives duplicate invoices or fails to enforce agreed supplier terms.
Freehand said its early customers have recovered between 5% and 10% of spending in complex categories, completed workflows five to seven times faster and reduced procurement-to-payment cycles by more than 70%.
The company said customers are using those efficiency gains to move employees into higher-value roles while reducing traditional outsourcing and business process outsourcing contracts.
Freehand is initially concentrating on the labor-intensive processes used to audit and pay supply chain invoices.
Large companies may receive thousands or millions of invoices across transportation, direct materials, maintenance, repair and operations. Reviewing those transactions can require employees to compare invoices against contracts, shipping records, purchase orders and supplier communications.
Freehand’s AI agents are intended to perform that work continuously while maintaining a record of the information and reasoning behind each decision.
The platform is built around Freehand’s Category Context Graph, which connects structured information from enterprise systems with unstructured information contained in contracts, documents, emails and other communications.
The graph records transactions, decisions and exceptions within each spending category. This gives the agents historical and operational context similar to the institutional knowledge accumulated by an experienced supply chain employee.
Each agent also adds new information to the graph as it works, allowing later decisions to draw on a larger adds new information to the graph as it works, allowing later decisions to draw record of supplier behavior, contract terms and previous exceptions.
Freehand said this structure creates a compounding intelligence effect in which each completed workflow improves the context and accuracy available for subsequent decisions.
The system also produces an audit trail explaining the basis for its actions, an important capability for enterprises using AI in financial and operational processes.
Freehand is positioning its technology as a replacement for portions of traditional enterprise software and outsourced operations rather than as a chatbot or employee copilot.
The company believes the primary difference is that its agents can make decisions and execute actions directly within business systems instead of only generating recommendations for employees.
Freehand was co-founded by CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar. Jayakrishnan previously founded and sold Pando, an enterprise software platform focused on logistics.
As part of the financing, Battery Ventures General Partner Dharmesh Thakker will join Freehand’s board of directors.
Battery Ventures highlighted Freehand’s focus on a specific enterprise workflow, early customer adoption and evidence that large customers are expanding their use of the platform.
NewRoad Capital Partners plans to use its enterprise network to support Freehand’s commercial expansion. The firm cited reduced overpayments, improved audit accuracy and lower operating expenses among the results reported by early customers.
PSP Growth founder Penny Pritzker, who previously served as U.S. Commerce Secretary, said Freehand demonstrates how advanced AI can generate measurable productivity improvements across enterprise supply chains.
Freehand is headquartered in San Francisco.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Matt Algar, Global Vice President of Supply Chain at Unilever
“Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot.”
“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.”
Nitin Jayakrishnan, Co-Founder and CEO 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.”
Abhijeet Manohar, Co-Founder of Freehand
“Unlike copilots that simply answer questions, Freehand’s agents have enterprise context, make decisions and take actions. This agency unlocks millions in savings for enterprises.”
Dharmesh Thakker, General Partner at Battery Ventures
“Freehand is delivering immediate ROI by helping enterprises reduce overpayments and operating costs, improve audit accuracy and automate highly manual supply chain finance workflows.”
Gregoire Lehmann, Partner at NewRoad Capital Partners
“Freehand is one of a few companies converting frontier AI into measurable productivity gains across enterprise supply chains, with rigor, scale and accountability.”
Penny Pritzker, Founder and Chairman of PSP Partners and PSP Growth
