AI Assistants Take Center Stage as Freehand Secures $75m for Enterprise Spending Automation

San Francisco-based AI company Freehand has landed a significant investment of $75 million to further develop its autonomous agents for enterprise spending and financial operations. The funding round was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with backing from PSP Growth - the investment firm founded by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker - alongside Nexus Venture Partners and other investors.

Freehand’s AI agents are designed to automate complex tasks in areas like procurement, supplier relationships, invoice processing, and payment operations across various categories. The company claims its technology can help businesses recover between 5% and 10% of spending in complex categories, complete workflows five to seven times faster, and reduce procure-to-pay cycles by up to 70%. These improvements allow finance and procurement teams to focus on higher-value activities.

Freehand has recently emerged from stealth mode, deploying its technology across major enterprises including Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’, and Cardinal Health. The investment highlights growing demand for AI infrastructure that can automate complex enterprise financial processes, with procurement, payments, and spend management emerging as key areas where businesses are seeking greater efficiency and control.

Freehand’s approach reflects a wider shift in enterprise technology towards agentic AI, which enables systems to execute tasks and manage workflows independently. Co-founder and CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan stated that the goal is ‘to close the gap’ between what software can do and what humans are currently doing. He emphasized that true autonomy in the enterprise is within reach.

Freehand’s Category Context Graph plays a key role in its technology, capturing decisions, transactions, and exceptions across individual spending categories. This graph combines structured enterprise data with information from documents, emails, and messages to enable AI agents to make informed decisions based on business context while maintaining an audit trail.

The investment also underscores the growing pressure businesses face to improve efficiency due to increasing tariffs, taxation changes, and labor market challenges. Freehand’s technology is designed to help companies simplify their financial workflows and reduce manual workloads for finance and procurement teams.

Unilever global VP of supply chain Matt Algar noted that Freehand marks one of the first full-scale agentic deployments at Unilever, representing an early anchor in the shift from software that assists to software that runs supply chains. Co-founder Abhijeet Manohar emphasized the significance of context in AI decision-making, stating ‘the difference between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests is context.’