Freehand raises USD $75 million for supply chain AI

Freehand has raised USD $75 million in seed funding in a round led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners.

Other investors included PSP Growth, Nexus Venture Partners and former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. The San Francisco supply chain AI startup said its software is already deployed at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health.

Freehand focuses on a narrow but costly part of corporate supply chains: the labour-intensive work of auditing and paying invoices, negotiating rates, managing suppliers and reconciling data across enterprise systems. Its AI agents are designed to take over those processes from legacy software and outsourced teams.

The company is entering a market defined by the scale of US supply chain spending. Citing Bureau of Economic Analysis figures, it said American businesses spend more than USD $20 trillion a year on raw materials, logistics, data centres and services.

Freehand argues that this spending has long been managed through a mix of ageing software and large outsourced workforces. Pressure from tariffs, taxes and immigration policies, it said, is exposing weaknesses in that model and creating demand for alternatives that reduce dependence on business process outsourcing.

Its pitch to large companies centres on direct cost reduction and faster execution. Across early deployments, Freehand said customers recovered 5% to 10% of spend in complex categories, completed workflows five to seven times faster and reduced procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%.

Those claims reflect a broader push to apply AI beyond chatbots and software assistants to operational tasks with financial consequences. In procurement and supply chain management, where many processes still depend on manual review and fragmented records, automation has long been limited by the need to interpret contracts, invoices, communications and internal policies together.

Freehand said its system addresses that challenge through what it calls a Category Context Graph, which records decisions, transactions and exceptions within a spending category. According to the company, that layer combines unstructured information from documents and communication channels with structured enterprise data, allowing its agents to make decisions while leaving an audit trail.

The business was founded by Nitin Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar. Jayakrishnan previously built and sold Pando, a software company focused on logistics.

Customer references were a prominent part of the announcement, underscoring the importance of proof points in a sector where large enterprises are cautious about handing core financial workflows to autonomous systems. One of those customers was Unilever.

"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.

Freehand's founders framed the business as a response to the gap between software budgets and labour costs in supply chain operations. They argued that the wider opportunity lies not only in replacing specific tools, but also in replacing the teams hired to compensate for software limitations.

"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."

Manohar drew a distinction between software that supports users and software that performs the work itself. That distinction is becoming central to how AI startups market themselves to large companies, particularly when they seek to justify premium valuations and large early funding rounds.

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

Investors said they were drawn by both customer traction and the company's narrow operational focus. Dharmesh Thakker of Battery Ventures is joining Freehand's board as part of the investment.

"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. "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."

NewRoad Capital Partners also cited the appeal of measurable outcomes in a corporate AI market still crowded with pilots and experiments. The firm said the company's early deployments showed immediate financial effects.

"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, and we're excited to leverage NewRoad's deep network of enterprises to help expand the company's enterprise footprint."

Pritzker linked the company to broader questions about productivity and industrial competitiveness in the US.

"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 rigor, scale and accountability."