--- title: Supply Chain AI Company Freehand Hires Grab and Delivery Hero Marketer as Its First US Marketing Lead description: Freehand, whose AI agents manage supply-chain spend for Meta and Pfizer, hires ex-Grab and Delivery Hero marketer Krshna Prashant to lead its brand. author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-09-21T11:50:55.291Z updated: 2026-09-21T11:50:55.309Z canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/freehand-krshna-prashant-first-us-marketing-lead image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/freehand-krshna-prashant.webp categories: Artificial Intelligence, Startups content_type: News region: San Francisco publication: Sovereign Magazine about: - type: Organization name: Freehand description: Freehand builds autonomous AI agents that run supply chain spend for large enterprises, covering procurement, supplier management, and invoice and payment operations. The agents are built on the company's Category Context Graph, a record of the decisions, transactions and exceptions across a category of spend, and they execute inside the ERP, procurement and finance systems customers already run rather than as a separate system. Based in San Francisco and formerly known as Pando, Freehand counts Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health among its customers. url: https://www.freehand.ai foundingDate: 2026-02-09T00:00:00.000Z industry: Supply Chain AI --- Freehand, the San Francisco company whose AI agents manage supply-chain spend for Meta, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, has hired Krshna Prashant, a consumer marketer who ran campaigns at Uber, Grab and Delivery Hero, as its first marketing lead in the US. The appointment follows the $75 million in funding Freehand [raised in July](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/freehand-supply-chain-ai-75m-funding), co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners with participation from PSP Growth, the fund of former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and Nexus Venture Partners. Prashant is the company's first marketing hire in the US and will set up its brand, its messaging and its go-to-market team from scratch. ## Freehand Hires a Consumer Marketer for an Enterprise Brand > "Bringing a B2C sensibility to B2B is how we intend to build a brand people remember, not just a product they buy." > — Nitin Jayakrishnan Nitin Jayakrishnan, Freehand's co-founder and chief executive, said the company chose to look outside enterprise software for the role. "We deliberately went looking for someone from the B2C world," he said. "The best consumer marketers know how to make people feel something and act, and that instinct is exactly what enterprise software has been missing. Krshna has done that at scale across two continents." Freehand's buyers are procurement and finance teams at some of the largest companies in the world. Prashant's first task is to explain to them what the company's agents do and how they differ from the software and outsourced teams those companies use now. "Freehand is doing something that has never been done at this scale, replacing legacy software and outsourced labor with AI Teams that actually make decisions and take action inside enterprise systems," Prashant said. "My job is to give that a voice. As the first marketing hire in the U.S., this is a rare chance to build a category, not just market a product." ## Krshna Prashant's Marketing Career at Uber, Grab and Delivery Hero Prashant has spent more than nine years in marketing across Europe and Southeast Asia. She started at Uber, where she ran CRM and in-app messaging for UberPOOL and the company's driver programs, before moving to Grab as brand marketing manager for Southeast Asia, running regional campaigns in eight markets. At Grab she led the company's first ESG and social impact report, a campaign that used customer data to show each user the social impact of their own activity on the platform. It won Silver at the WARC Prize for Asian Strategy in 2020. As head of marketing at Flash Coffee in Singapore, she ran marketing through more than 30 store openings, hired and managed a team of nine, and took unaided brand awareness to 80%, the company says. Most recently she was head of campaigns for the EU and Turkey at Delivery Hero, running product adoption and co-marketing work across more than seven European markets on a promotional budget of several million euros. Prashant holds a BBA in marketing and strategy from Singapore Management University. She also writes personal essays on a Substack, Halfway Home. ## AI Supply Chain Agents at Fortune 500 Companies Freehand's AI agents handle procurement, supplier management and invoice and payment work for large enterprises, in categories of spend such as logistics, direct materials, and maintenance, repair and operations. The agents read contracts and company policies and carry out decisions directly inside a customer's own systems. The company says they already process billions of dollars in payments across 60 to 70 countries, for customers including Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health. The agents work from what Freehand calls a Category Context Graph, a record of every decision, transaction and exception within a category of spend, drawn from both documents and structured system data. It gives the agents the background a human buyer would normally carry, and leaves an audit trail for each action they take. Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, Freehand's other co-founder, previously started Pando, a logistics and procure-to-pay software company. Freehand was founded in 2024 and has its Asia Pacific headquarters in Chennai, India. ## Competition in AI for Procurement Established procurement suites such as Coupa and SAP Ariba have added AI agents to their products, and startups including Zip and Levelpath, the latter also backed by Battery Ventures, sell AI procurement software to the same large buyers. Freehand's case to customers is that its agents take over work large companies currently pay outsourced teams to do, as well as replacing older software. Jayakrishnan put the numbers at $16 billion a year spent on supply chain software and $348 billion spent on people doing what that software cannot. ## FAQ **Q: What does Freehand AI do?** Freehand sells autonomous AI agents that manage supply-chain spend for large enterprises. The agents handle procurement, supplier management, and invoice and payment processing, reading contracts and policies and acting directly inside a company's existing systems. Customers include Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health. **Q: Who are the founders of Freehand AI?** Freehand was co-founded in 2024 by Nitin Jayakrishnan, its chief executive, and Abhijeet Manohar, who previously co-founded the logistics software company Pando together. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with its Asia Pacific headquarters in Chennai. **Q: Who is Freehand's new marketing lead?** Krshna Prashant, a consumer marketer with more than nine years of experience at Uber, Grab, Flash Coffee and Delivery Hero, is Freehand's first marketing hire in the US. She is responsible for the company's brand, messaging and go-to-market team. **Q: How is AI used in procurement?** AI in procurement ranges from tools that summarize contracts and flag risks to agents that carry out work on their own. Freehand's agents negotiate rates, enforce contract terms, process invoices and reconcile payments, and record each decision so the work can be audited. **About Freehand** Freehand builds autonomous AI agents that run supply chain spend for large enterprises, covering procurement, supplier management, and invoice and payment operations. The agents are built on the company's Category Context Graph, a record of the decisions, transactions and exceptions across a category of spend, and they execute inside the ERP, procurement and finance systems customers already run rather than as a separate system. Based in San Francisco and formerly known as Pando, Freehand counts Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health among its customers. [Website](https://www.freehand.ai)