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Freehand AI Agents autonomously manage supply-chain spend for Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Dunkin’, Pfizer and Cardinal Health
SAN FRANCISCO CA – July 29, 2026; Freehand, whose AI agents manage supply-chain spend for the Fortune 500, today announced $75 million in funding co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from PSP Growth — the fund led by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker — and Nexus Venture Partners.
American companies spend more than $20 trillion a year on the raw materials, logistics, data centers and services that power the U.S. economy, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. For decades, supply chain spend has been managed on legacy software and armies of outsourced labor. Freehand replaces this machinery with autonomous AI Teams that take decisions and actions: negotiating rates, enforcing contracts, managing suppliers, processing payments, and reconciling data within enterprise systems.
This financing round comes with Freehand recently emerging from stealth with global deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’ and Cardinal Health – as tariffs, taxes and immigration policy strain the outsourcing model that ran supply chains for three decades. Across early deployments, customers have recovered 5-10% of spend in complex categories, completed workflows 5–7x faster, and shortened procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%, redeploying their teams to higher-value work while winding down outsourcing and BPO contracts.
Freehand starts by solving one problem exceptionally well: replacing the outsourced labor and legacy software that check and pay invoices across the supply chain. Its AI Agents run the entire workflow – reading contracts, negotiating with suppliers, catching leakage, processing payments and closing the loop with procurement – automating work that today runs on outsourced teams and legacy tools, costing organizations tens of millions a year. From there, Freehand expands across multiple supply chain processes, and across categories of spend, becoming part of the infrastructure that runs global supply chains.
“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.
“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.”
Freehand’s central IP is its Category Context Graph, which captures every decision, transaction and exception across a category of spend – unifying the unstructured signals buried in documents and communication channels with the structured data in enterprise systems. It gives the agents the situational knowledge that a tenured supply-chain expert carries in their head, and an audit trail of why every decision was made. Every agent Freehand deploys is built on the graph and enriches it in turn, so each decision compounds the accuracy and autonomy of the next.
“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.”
“American industrial competitiveness is decided inside the operating core of large companies,” said Penny Pritzker, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of PSP Growth. “Freehand is one of the few companies turning frontier AI into measurable productivity for enterprise supply chain operations – at the scale and accountability those environments demand.”
About Freehand
Freehand builds autonomous AI agents that run supply-chain spend for the world’s largest enterprises — taking on procurement, supplier management, invoice and payment operations across complex categories such as logistics, direct materials and MRO. Built on Freehand’s Category Context Graph, the agents reason across structured and unstructured data, understand contracts and policies, and execute decisions directly in collaboration tools and enterprise systems, delivering measurable savings and fully auditable outcomes without adding headcount or outsourcing contracts. Headquartered in San Francisco, Freehand is backed by Battery Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, NewRoad Capital Partners and others. Learn more at https://www.freehand.ai.
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Image source: freehand.ai
