Freehand’s $75M round, co-led by Battery Ventures, backs AI agents that negotiate rates and enforce contracts. Clients like Unilever and JNJ see 5-10% spend recovery.
Freehand, a startup building AI agents that manage supply chain spending, has raised $75 million in a funding round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners. PSP Growth, the venture arm of former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, joined alongside Nexus Venture Partners and other investors.
Large U.S. companies have long relied on legacy software and armies of outsourced staff to handle procurement and supplier management. Freehand replaces that with autonomous AI teams that negotiate rates, enforce contracts, process payments and reconcile data inside enterprise systems, the company said. Across early deployments, customers recovered 5-10% of spending in complex categories, completed workflows five to seven times faster and cut procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%, according to Freehand.
Early clients include Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health. Unilever (UL), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Cardinal Health (CAH) are publicly traded. AlphaScala rates JNJ at 60 out of 100 (moderate), UL at 62 (moderate) and CAH at 58 (moderate).
Freehand's chief executive, Nitin Jayakrishnan, said enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion on people to do what that software cannot. “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,” he said in a statement. Jayakrishnan previously founded Pando, an enterprise SaaS platform for logistics.
Battery Ventures' Dharmesh Thakker, who is joining Freehand's board, called the startup an applied-AI company with a vertical wedge and
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