Enterprise AI startup Freehand has raised $75 million in a Series B funding round to scale its autonomous AI agents, which manage complex supply chain spend and back-office operations for enterprise companies.
Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led the financing, which included participation from Nexus Venture Partners and former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. With its latest capital injection, San Francisco-based Freehand has now raised $100 million.
While Freehand declined to reveal its valuation, CEO and co-founder Nitin Jayakrishnan said it was “a significant step up” from the startup’s $25 million Series A that was raised in March 2024.
The deal comes as tariffs, taxes, and immigration policy strain the outsourcing model that ran supply chains for decades. Freehand’s fundraise also lands amid an uptick in venture funding to supply chain and logistics-related startups, with 2026 on pace to deliver the strongest year since 2022, per Crunchbase data, with $6.2 billion raised by such companies in the first half of this year across 350 deals.
Logistics roots
Freehand was founded in February 2024 by Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, two enterprise logistics veterans who previously co-founded and recently sold Pando, a SaaS transportation management system (TMS) and procure-to-pay system of record for large enterprise logistics.
In early 2024, as AI transformation accelerated, Jayakrishnan and Manohar stepped away from operational roles at Pando, moving to board positions, to launch Freehand as an independent entity focused entirely on agentic AI.
Pando continued operating under a newly appointed executive team before being sold to a strategic buyer in early 2026, marking a complete shareholder exit for the founders.
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 dinosaur of an industry for the last six to eight years,” Jayakrishnan told Crunchbase News in an interview. “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.”
Beyond corporate cards
While spend management platforms like Ramp focus on corporate cards, employee travel expenses, and bill payments, Freehand targets complex supply chain operations. That means that instead of processing standard receipts and routine approvals, its AI agents manage non-standard spending across logistics, raw materials, parts, and labor.
The software operates inside existing company systems, performing tasks like reading contracts, policies, emails, and internal data to verify bills, track operational milestones, and handle vendor negotiations.
Automating complex financial governance
For large, global businesses, keeping track of supplier bills across complex shipping routes like the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz is difficult. Contracts are detailed, and checking whether large bills match actual work has historically required big back-office teams.
“When eventually rubber hits the road, 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 you know if that number is right or wrong,” Jayakrishnan noted. “And so there are large teams that have gotten built over the course of the last decade or so, whose job it is to check these invoices, negotiate these contracts, and figure out whether service obligations from global suppliers are in alignment with contract governance overall.”
When billing discrepancies arise, Freehand’s AI agents negotiate adjustments directly with suppliers while maintaining strategic vendor relationships.
“If it is not, then negotiating with the supplier becomes, ‘’you should have charged me $16.4 million instead of charging me $16.9 million and here’s why I’m not going to pay you the difference,’ and going back and forth without… losing the sensitivity towards that relationship itself,” Jayakrishnan said. “Taking those business calls, which have historically been done through tribal knowledge… and truly automating the process to the point of no human intervention is effectively what Freehand does.”
Measurable ROI for Fortune 500 spend
By shifting from manual oversight to agentic automation, Freehand believes it allows enterprises to reduce their reliance on third-party offshore outsourcing and give internal employees more room to perform higher-value strategic work.
Freehand 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, per the company.
Some of the benefits of its technology, according to Jayakrishnan, include recovering 5% to 10% of total spend across a number of categories; completing “complex” 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 daily operations at global scale,” Jayakrishnan said. “Our ask of the enterprise … is to allow us to give AI a free hand to run supply chain finance for your business.”
Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, noted that while supply chain and logistics management is a massive sector, it predominantly “still runs on manual labor and repetitive workflows that are begging to be automated.”
“And that’s before you account for the turmoil: tariffs, shifting geopolitics, disrupted trade routes,” he wrote via email. “Meanwhile, technology spending is a rounding error at just over $20 billion, which tells us AI has enormous room to drive efficiency, starting with the most mission-critical but repetitive workflows like freight audits and payments.”
Thakker said his firm did deep research on supply chain AI across its global offices and found Freehand to stand out on multiple fronts, including founder market-fit, a focus on the largest Fortune 500 shippers “rather than the intermediaries everyone else chases, and clear, measurable business outcomes.”
Related Crunchbase query:
Illustration: Dom Guzman
Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the
Crunchbase Daily.
