Freehand has raised $75 million in funding co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with backing from PSP Growth, chaired by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and Nexus Venture Partners.
Its AI agents already manage supply-chain operations for Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’ and Cardinal Health.
Customers have reported recovering 5–10% of supply-chain spend, completing workflows 5–7x faster, and reducing procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%.
Freehand has raised $75 million to expand its AI agents that manage supply-chain spend for Fortune 500 companies, with the round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners. PSP Growth, the investment firm chaired by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and Nexus Venture Partners also joined the round.
The funding lands as Freehand’s agents are already live inside Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’ and Cardinal Health, taking over work long handled by legacy software and outsourced labour.
“This is the beginning of true autonomy in the enterprise,” says Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and chief executive of Freehand.
Why now: the outsourcing model is under pressure
American companies spend more than $20 trillion a year on the raw materials, logistics, data centres and services that power the economy, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. For three decades, that spend has run on 1990s-era enterprise software, backed by outsourced workers processing invoices, contracts and supplier payments.
Freehand’s pitch is blunt: enterprises spend $16 billion a year on the software and another $348 billion paying people to do what it cannot. That gap is what Freehand is going after, and the timing is not incidental: tariffs, new taxes and shifting immigration policy are squeezing the outsourcing and business-process-outsourcing model that has run supply chains for years.
Battery Ventures, Freehand’s own lead investor here, already backs Coupa, a cloud-based enterprise spend-management platform. That puts Freehand in the odd position of potentially competing with technology inside its own backer’s portfolio if it pushes further into procurement software rather than staying focused on services automation.
How Freehand’s agents work
Freehand was founded in San Francisco in 2024 by Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, who previously built Pando, an enterprise logistics software platform later acquired after serving global manufacturers and logistics firms. That experience shaped their read on the industry’s biggest inefficiency: software that assists workers instead of replacing the work itself.
The startup works by giving its AI agents what it calls a Category Context Graph, a system that combines structured enterprise data with contracts, emails and other unstructured documents so the agents have context before acting. Rather than answering questions like a chatbot, the agents read supplier contracts, negotiate rates, approve invoices, process payments and reconcile records directly inside enterprise systems.
“The difference between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests is context,” says co-founder Manohar.
Freehand sits in a crowded field of startups building agents that do enterprise work rather than assist with it. Harvey raised $200 million at an $11 billion valuation in March 2026, Norm AI secured $120 million at a $1.2 billion valuation, Abridge raised $300 million at a $5.3 billion valuation, and Writer secured $200 million at a $1.9 billion valuation.
What separates Freehand is a narrow focus on procurement and supply-chain finance, one of the largest and least automated corners of enterprise spend, and customer traction that goes beyond pilots: full production deployments at some of the largest companies in the world within roughly two years of founding.
Early results back that up. Customers have recovered 5–10% of spend in complex categories, completed workflows 5–7x faster and cut procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%, freeing procurement teams for higher-value work while companies wind down outsourcing and business-process-outsourcing 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,” says Matt Algar, global vice president of supply chain at Unilever.
The market opportunity and what’s next
The broader market gives Freehand room to run. According to Grand View Research, the global supply-chain management market was worth roughly $32.9 billion in 2024 and is projected to top $76 billion by 2030 as automation and AI adoption spread through logistics and procurement.
“Freehand has built more than an AI copilot. Its agents understand enterprise context, make decisions and take action — unlocking millions in savings for large organisations,” says Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, who is joining Freehand’s board.
Gregoire Lehmann, partner at NewRoad Capital Partners, points to measurable outcomes rather than hype: “Freehand is delivering immediate ROI by helping enterprises reduce overpayments and operating costs, improve audit accuracy, and automate highly manual supply chain finance workflows.”
Pritzker, chairman of PSP Growth, framed the stakes in national terms: “American industrial competitiveness is decided inside the operating core of large companies.”
Freehand plans to use the funding to expand beyond invoice processing into more supply-chain categories, including direct materials and maintenance, repair and operations spend, as it works to become embedded infrastructure inside enterprise supply chains rather than another software layer on top of them.
For years, enterprises modernised supply chains by layering new software on top of outsourced operations. Freehand is betting the next phase will remove both. If its AI agents continue delivering measurable savings at companies such as Meta, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson, the biggest disruption may not be to enterprise software vendors, but to the global outsourcing industry that has quietly powered supply chains for decades.