Enterprise AI startup Freehand has closed a $75 million Series B funding round to scale autonomous AI agents that manage complex supply chain spend and back-office operations for large enterprises. The round, co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, brings Freehand’s total raised to $100 million.
What Freehand’s Agents Actually Do
Freehand’s agents operate inside existing enterprise systems, reading contracts, policies, emails, and internal data to verify supplier bills, track operational milestones, and handle vendor negotiations autonomously. The target is non-standard supply chain spending: logistics, raw materials, parts, and labor costs that sit outside the scope of corporate card platforms like Ramp.
“When you get an invoice from a supplier saying, ‘Hey, you owe me $16.948 million for everything that I’ve done for you in the last six months,’ there aren’t a lot of proof points to figure out whether that number is right or wrong,” CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan told Crunchbase News. When discrepancies arise, Freehand’s agents negotiate adjustments directly with suppliers while maintaining the vendor relationship.
The company claims approximately 50 customers, including Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Cardinal Health. According to Jayakrishnan, the platform autonomously processes billions in payments across 60 to 70 countries and hundreds of currencies without human supervision.
From Pando to Freehand
Jayakrishnan and co-founder Abhijeet Manohar are enterprise logistics veterans who previously co-founded Pando, a SaaS transportation management and procure-to-pay system. They launched Freehand in February 2024, stepping away from operational roles at Pando (which was sold to a strategic buyer in early 2026) to build a company focused entirely on agentic AI for supply chain finance.
“Instead of trying to catch them up to a technology paradigm that was sunsetting, we thought we could leapfrog them into a technology paradigm that was just rising,” Jayakrishnan said, according to Crunchbase News.
Performance Claims and Market Context
Freehand reports recovering 5% to 10% of total spend across categories, completing complex operational workflows 5x to 7x faster, and reducing procure-to-pay cycle times by more than 70%. The fundraise lands as supply chain and logistics venture funding is on pace for its strongest year since 2022, with $6.2 billion raised by such companies in the first half of 2026 across 350 deals, according to Crunchbase data.
The Outsourcing Replacement Thesis
The deal arrives as tariffs, shifting trade routes, and immigration policy strain the outsourcing model that ran supply chains for decades. Freehand’s pitch is that autonomous agents can replace the large back-office teams historically responsible for invoice verification, contract compliance, and supplier negotiation. Jayakrishnan frames the company as the first global AI deployment at scale for many of its Fortune 500 customers: “Our ask of the enterprise is to allow us to give AI a free hand to run supply chain finance for your business.”