Freehand raises $75m to expand supply chain AI agents

Freehand raises $75m in new funding to build AI agents that manage supply chain spending for large enterprises. The company is targeting a procurement and operations market in which US businesses spend more than $20 trillion a year on raw materials, logistics, data centres and services, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The round was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners. Freehand said other participants included PSP Growth, the venture capital firm associated with former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and Nexus Venture Partners.

Freehand builds software intended to take over parts of supply chain spend management that have typically relied on older enterprise systems and outsourced operational teams. The company said customers already signed on include Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health.

How do Freehand's AI agents work?

Freehand describes its product as autonomous AI teams that can make decisions and take actions inside enterprise workflows. The agents are designed to negotiate rates, enforce contracts, manage suppliers, process payments and reconcile data across company systems.

The company said its core technology is a Category Context Graph, a system that records decisions, transactions and exceptions across a spending category. In Freehand's description, the graph brings together unstructured information from documents and communications with structured data held in enterprise software, giving the agents the context needed to act and leaving an audit trail for each decision.

Each AI agent is built on the graph and updates it as work is completed, according to Freehand. That mechanism is intended to give the software a record of supplier terms, contract details, payment exceptions and other operational data that would otherwise sit across separate teams and tools.

Why is Freehand targeting supply chain spend?

Freehand said supply chains have come under greater pressure from tariffs, taxes and immigration policies, adding strain to the outsourcing model often used to run global procurement and operations. The company argues that AI agents can reduce manual work in categories where contracts, invoices, supplier messages and enterprise records have to be checked against one another.

Freehand claims that early deployments have helped clients recover 5% to 10% of spend in complex categories. It also said customers have completed workflows five to seven times faster and reduced procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%.

Nitin Jayakrishnan, Freehand's chief executive, said enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to perform work the software does not handle. He said Freehand was built to address that gap with AI agents that can decide, act and be accountable for outcomes.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.