SAN FRANCISCO, CA, July 30, 2026 – Freehand has raised $75 million to replace outsourced supply chain labor with AI agents that negotiate rates, enforce contracts, manage suppliers, and process payments inside enterprise systems. Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led the round, with PSP Growth, Nexus Venture Partners, and others. Across deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’, and Cardinal Health, customers have recovered 5-10% of spend in complex categories, completed workflows 5–7x faster, and reduce procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%.
Freehand’s agents take over the full audit-to-payment pipeline: reading contracts, negotiating with suppliers, identifying leakage, processing payments, and closing the loop with procurement. Organizations are redeploying employees to higher-value work and reducing 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.
“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.” Nitin previously built and sold Pando, an enterprise SaaS platform for logistics.
At the center of the platform is a Category Context Graph that records every decision, transaction, and exception across a spend category. It unifies unstructured data from documents and communication channels with structured data from enterprise systems, giving each agent the knowledge of a tenured supply-chain expert and an audit trail for every decision. As agents operate, they feed new data back into the graph, so subsequent decisions draw on more context than the ones before.
“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.”
“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, and we’re excited to leverage NewRoad’s deep network of enterprises to help expand the company’s enterprise footprint.”
“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.”
Source: Freehand
About Freehand
Freehand develops AI software for supply chain spend management, procurement and finance operations. Founded in 2026, the company is headquartered in San Francisco. Its software reads contracts, invoices, emails, supplier records and other business documents. It compares charges with contracts and operating records, handles exceptions and records results in enterprise systems. Freehand supports freight auditing, parcel spending, logistics costs, accounts receivable and global trade compliance. Customers include companies in consumer products, automotive, pharmaceuticals, retail, chemicals, logistics and manufacturing. The software connects with enterprise resource planning, transportation management and procurement systems. Freehand works with procurement, finance, accounts payable and supply chain teams. The company reports more than 100,000 vendors onboarded and over $10 billion in spend under management. Freehand is backed by Battery Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, NewRoad Capital Partners, among others.