Freehand, a company deploying AI agents to autonomously manage supply chain spend for Fortune 500 giants, announced a $75 million funding round. The investment was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from PSP Growth and Nexus Venture Partners.
This Freehand AI funding round underscores a shift from assistive software to autonomous systems in enterprise operations. American companies spend over $20 trillion annually on supply chain essentials, a sector long reliant on legacy software and extensive outsourced labor. Freehand's AI Teams are designed to replace this, handling tasks from contract negotiation and supplier management to payment processing and data reconciliation.
Emerging from stealth, Freehand already boasts deployments with Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin', and Cardinal Health. These early implementations have shown customers recovering 5-10% of spend in complex categories, completing workflows 5-7 times faster, and shortening procure-to-pay cycles by over 70%. This allows companies to redeploy human teams to higher-value work while scaling back costly outsourcing contracts.
Freehand's initial focus is on automating invoice checking and payment across the supply chain. Its AI Agents manage the entire workflow, from reading contracts and negotiating with suppliers to identifying leakage and processing payments, tasks that typically involve large outsourced teams and outdated tools.
Matt Algar, Global VP of Supply Chain at Unilever, noted that Freehand represents one of Unilever's first full-scale agentic deployments, marking a pivotal shift towards software that actively runs the supply chain.
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Nitin Jayakrishnan, Freehand's co-founder and CEO, stated, "Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot." He added, "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."
Co-founder Abhijeet Manohar emphasized the shift from building software for users to building software that is the user, enabling deeper customer transformations. He highlighted that the distinction between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests lies in its contextual understanding.
Central to Freehand's technology is its Category Context Graph. This proprietary IP captures every decision, transaction, and exception within a spend category, integrating unstructured data from documents and communications with structured enterprise system data. This provides agents with the situational knowledge of a seasoned supply chain expert, complete with an audit trail for every decision. Each agent enriches this graph, continually improving accuracy and autonomy.
Dharmesh Thakker, General Partner at Battery Ventures and new Freehand board member, praised Freehand as an applied-AI company with a strong vertical focus and significant customer loyalty. He stressed that Freehand's agents, unlike mere co-pilots, possess enterprise context, make decisions, and take actions, unlocking millions in savings for clients. The application of AI agents for supply chain automation represents a substantial leap.
Gregoire Lehmann, Partner at NewRoad Capital Partners, highlighted the measurable business outcomes Freehand delivers, including reduced overpayments, lower operating costs, and improved audit accuracy. He believes Freehand is poised to lead the AI-native supply chain spend management category.
Penny Pritzker, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of PSP Growth, underscored Freehand's role in translating frontier AI into tangible productivity for enterprise supply chain operations, meeting demands for scale and accountability.
