AI startup Freehand raises $75 million for supply-chain expansion

Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital co-lead funding as startup expands AI agents that automate procurement and supply-chain spending for Fortune 500 companies

Freehand, whose artificial intelligence (AI) agents manage supply-chain spending for companies such as Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Dunkin', Pfizer and Cardinal Health, has raised $75 million in a funding round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners. The round also saw participation from former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker's venture capital firm, PSP Growth, Nexus Venture Partners and others.

 

American companies spend more than $20 trillion a year on the raw materials, logistics, data centres and services that power the US economy, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. For decades, supply-chain spending has been managed through legacy software and armies of outsourced labour. Freehand replaces this machinery with autonomous AI teams that make decisions and take action to negotiate rates, enforce contracts, manage suppliers, process payments and reconcile data within enterprise systems.

 

"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, cofounder and chief executive officer (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 previously built and sold Pando, an enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for logistics.

 

This funding round follows Freehand's recent emergence from stealth with global deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health, as tariffs, taxes and immigration policies put increasing strain on the outsourcing model that has historically run global supply chains. Across early deployments, customers have recovered 5–10 per cent of spending in complex categories, completed workflows five to seven times faster, and reduced procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70 per cent. As a result, organisations are redeploying employees to higher-value work while reducing traditional outsourcing and business process outsourcing (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 vice-president (VP), Supply Chain, Unilever.

 

Freehand solves one problem exceptionally well: replacing the outsourced labour and legacy software used to audit and pay invoices across the supply chain. Its AI agents run the entire workflow — reading contracts, negotiating with suppliers, identifying leakage, processing payments and closing the loop with procurement — replacing outsourced teams and legacy tools that cost organisations tens of millions of dollars a year.

 

"The very nature of work is changing, with AI," said Abhijeet Manohar, cofounder 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."

 

Freehand's central intellectual property (IP) is its Category Context Graph, which captures every decision, transaction and exception across a spending category. By unifying the unstructured data buried in documents and communication channels with the structured data in enterprise systems, it gives the agents the situational knowledge of a tenured supply-chain expert, along with an audit trail explaining every decision. Every AI agent Freehand deploys is built on and continuously enriches the graph, creating a compounding intelligence effect in which each decision improves the accuracy, context and autonomy of the next.

 

Abhishek Sharma, partner, Nexus Venture Partners, said, "As an early investor, we've had a front-row seat to Nitin and Abhi's evolution from freight software to AI teams that run complex procurement, finance and operations workflows for Fortune 500 companies. Freehand represents a fundamental shift, from software that assists people to autonomous teams that own outcomes, and is poised to reshape hundreds of billions of dollars in software and labour spending."

 

"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."

 

"What stood out to us about Freehand wasn't just the technology, but the measurable business outcomes customers were achieving," said Gregoire Lehmann, partner at NewRoad Capital Partners. "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."

 

"America's industrial competitiveness relies on how effectively our largest companies operate," said Penny Pritzker, founder and chairman of PSP Partners & PSP Growth. "Freehand is one of a few companies converting frontier AI into measurable productivity gains across enterprise supply chains, with rigour, scale and accountability."