Freehand has raised $75 million to solve expense management problems in enterprise supply chains, which often face manual management and financial leakage as businesses scale.
Investment Round and Partners
The funding round was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners. PSP Growth, a firm led by former US Secretary of Commerce Penny Fitzpatrick, also participated in the round, as did Nexus Venture Partners. Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Freehand, stated that this funding marks the beginning of true autonomy in the corporate sector.
Business Problems
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, American companies spend over $20 trillion annually on goods, logistics, technology, and services. Freehand believes that this model is becoming too expensive to maintain. The company estimates that enterprises spend billions on software, with significantly more funds being spent on manual processes. Freehand claims that businesses spend $16 billion per year on such software and another $348 billion on the labor of people performing tasks that software could handle.
How Freehand Agents Work
Freehand was founded in 2024 by Nitin Jayakrishnan and Abhijay Manohar. Previously, they worked on logistics at Pando, where they observed procurement and finance teams losing hours due to manual assignments. This experience solidified their belief: software should replace work, not just assist it.
The agents operate based on Freehand's so-called Category Context Graph, which combines structured enterprise data with contracts and emails, providing the agents with the necessary context before taking action. Instead of suggesting answers like a chatbot, they directly read supplier contracts, negotiate rates, approve invoices, and reconcile records within enterprise systems.
Competitive Advantage
Manohar emphasizes that the key difference between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests lies in the context. Freehand competes with well-funded rivals such as Harvey, Norm AI, Abridge, and Writer, which have secured multi-million dollar rounds this year, as investors actively seek corporate AI agents. Freehand's distinguishing feature is its narrow specialization in procurement and supply chain finance, as well as its full-scale implementation in large companies approximately two years after its founding, rather than just pilot projects.
Results and Development Plans
Matt Algar, Global Vice President of Supply Chain at Unilever, noted that Freehand has become one of the first examples of full-scale agent implementation at Unilever and represents an early core shift from auxiliary software to software that manages the supply chain. According to Grand View Research, the supply chain management market was valued at about $32.9 billion in 2024, and thanks to the automation of logistics and procurement, it is projected to double to over $76 billion by 2030.
Freehand plans to use the new funding to expand functionality beyond invoice processing to include direct material costs, as well as maintenance, repair, and operating expenses. This will allow the company to become embedded infrastructure within supply chains, rather than just another layer of software on top of them. While enterprises have spent years modernizing their supply chains by layering new software over outsourced labor, Freehand is betting on eliminating both simultaneously.
