Freehand, whose autonomous AI agents run supply-chain spend for the Fortune 500, said Tuesday it has raised $75 million in Series B funding co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from PSP Growth — the fund led by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker — and Nexus Venture Partners. The round brings the San Francisco company's total funding to $100 million.
AI teams that decide and act
Freehand's pitch is that supply-chain spend has been run for decades on legacy software and armies of outsourced labour. Its AI Teams replace that stack, reading contracts, negotiating rates with suppliers, catching leakage, processing payments and reconciling data directly inside enterprise systems. Across early deployments the company says customers have recovered 5–10% of spend in complex categories, moved workflows 5–7x faster and shortened procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%.
Meta, Unilever and J&J on the customer list
The company recently exited stealth with global deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health. "Freehand marks one of the first full-scale agentic deployments at Unilever and is an early anchor in the shift from software that assists to software that runs our supply chain," said Matt Algar, Global VP of Supply Chain at Unilever.
Central to the platform is the Category Context Graph, which unifies unstructured signals from contracts, emails and chat with structured ERP data and gives each agent the situational knowledge of a tenured procurement expert — with an audit trail for every decision.
Applied AI over frontier hype
Battery general partner Dharmesh Thakker — who is joining Freehand's board — framed the round as a bet on agents that take action, not co-pilots that suggest. Freehand's raise follows a wave of applied-AI financings including Encore AI's $30M Series A, Robust.AI's Carter deployment at O'Neill Logistics and UNIT AI's $12M seed for modular warehouse automation. Nitin Jayakrishnan, Freehand's co-founder and CEO, previously built and sold logistics SaaS platform Pando.
Reporting based on coverage from Freehand, Crunchbase, GlobeNewswire and Tech Startups.