Freehand Secures $75M Series B Funding to Automate Complex Supply Chain Spend for Fortune 500 Companies

San Francisco-based enterprise AI startup Freehand has secured a significant funding boost, raising $75 million in its latest Series B round. This substantial investment will enable the company to scale its autonomous AI agents, which are designed to manage complex supply chain spend and back-office operations for large enterprises.

The financing was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. With this latest capital injection, Freehand has now raised a total of $100 million. While the company declined to reveal its valuation, CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan described it as ‘a significant step up’ from their previous Series A funding round in March 2024.

The deal comes at a time when tariffs, taxes, and immigration policy are straining the traditional outsourcing model that has dominated supply chains for decades. Additionally, there is an uptick in venture funding to supply chain and logistics-related startups, with Crunchbase data indicating that 2026 is on pace to deliver its strongest year since 2022, with $6.2 billion raised by such companies in the first half of this year across 350 deals.

Freehand was founded in February 2024 by Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, two enterprise logistics veterans who previously co-founded Pando, a SaaS transportation management system (TMS) and procure-to-pay system. As AI transformation accelerated, the pair stepped away from operational roles at Pando to launch Freehand as an independent entity focused on agentic AI.

Their experience building enterprise supply chain software convinced them that existing back-office paradigms were ripe for disruption. ‘We had been in this fairly archaic industry for the last six to eight years,’ Jayakrishnan noted, adding that instead of trying to catch up with outdated technology, they could leapfrog into a more modern paradigm.

While spend management platforms like Ramp focus on corporate cards and employee travel expenses, Freehand targets complex supply chain operations. Its AI agents manage non-standard spending across logistics, raw materials, parts, and labor by reading contracts, policies, emails, and internal data to verify bills and track operational milestones.

For large global businesses, keeping track of supplier bills is a daunting task, especially when dealing with complex shipping routes like the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. Contracts are detailed, and checking whether large bills match actual work has historically required big back-office teams.

When billing discrepancies arise, Freehand’s AI agents negotiate adjustments directly with suppliers while maintaining strategic vendor relationships. ‘If it is not correct,’ Jayakrishnan explained, ‘then negotiating with the supplier becomes a matter of adjusting the bill to reflect what was actually done.’

By shifting from manual oversight to agentic automation, Freehand believes its technology allows enterprises to reduce their reliance on third-party offshore outsourcing and give internal employees more room to perform higher-value strategic work. The company counts some 50 customers, including Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Cardinal Health.

Its platform autonomously processes billions in payments across 60 to 70 countries and hundreds of currencies without human supervision. Some benefits of its technology include recovering 5% to 10% of total spend; completing operational workflows 5x to 7x faster; and reducing overall procure-to-pay cycle times by more than 70%. ‘We are, for a lot of companies, their first global rollout of AI deployments at scale that impacts daily transactions and operations,’ Jayakrishnan noted.

Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, emphasized the potential for supply chain and logistics management to be significantly improved through automation. He highlighted the ‘enormous room’ for AI-driven efficiency gains in this sector, particularly when it comes to repetitive workflows like freight audits and payments.