Freehand founders Abhijeet Manohar and Nitin Jayakrishnan
Freehand, the company behind AI agents that manage supply-chain spends for Fortune 500 enterprises, has raised $75 million in funding co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker’s venture capital PSP Growth, Nexus Venture Partners and others.Large supply chain spends of American companies has been historically managed on legacy software and armies of outsourced labour. The US- and Chennai-based Freehand replaces this with autonomous AI Teams that make decisions and take action to negotiate rates, enforce contracts, manage suppliers, process payments, and reconcile data within enterprise systems, the company said.This financing round follows Freehand’s recent emergence from stealth with global deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’ and Cardinal Health, as tariffs, taxes and immigration policies put increasing strain on global supply chains.“Across early deployments, customers have recovered 5-10% of spend in complex categories, completed workflows 5–7x faster, and reduced procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%. As a result, organisations are redeploying their employees to higher-value work, while reducing traditional outsourcing and BPO contracts,” Freehand said in a statement.Its AI agents run the entire workflow involving reading contracts, negotiating with suppliers, identifying leakage, processing payments and closing the loop with procurement, and thus replacing legacy tools that cost organisations millions.“Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot,” Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Freehand, said in a statement. “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 Pando, an enterprise SaaS platform for logistics.Freehand’s key IP is its Category Context Graph, which captures every transaction across a spend category. By unifying unstructured data and communication channels with structured data in enterprise systems, it gives agents the situational knowledge and an audit trail explaining every decision.“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.”Abhishek Sharma, Partner, Nexus Venture Partners, said, “Freehand represents a fundamental shift, from software that assists people to autonomous teams that own outcomes, and is poised to reshape hundreds of billions of dollars in software and labour spend.”Published on July 29, 2026
