---
title: Supply Chain AI Startup Freehand Raises $75 Million to Replace Outsourced Teams Running Fortune 500 Spend
description: Freehand has raised $75 million co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital to scale AI agents that run supply chain spend for Meta, Unilever and Pfizer.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
updated: 2026-07-29T07:23:42.438Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/freehand-supply-chain-ai-75m-funding
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/freehand-founders.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, a San Francisco company whose AI agents manage supply-chain spend for Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health, has raised $75 million to take over work that large companies currently pay outsourced teams of people to do.

The round is co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from PSP Growth, the fund chaired by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and Nexus Venture Partners. Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery, joins the board. [Freehand](https://www.freehand.ai/) came out of stealth in February 2026 and is run by chief executive Nitin Jayakrishnan, who previously founded the logistics software company Pando, and chief technology officer Abhijeet Manohar. Nexus is a returning backer, having invested in Pando's Series B in 2023. NewRoad, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, was founded by former Walmart executives and invests in US supply chain and logistics businesses.

## Supply Chain Software and the Labor Bill Around It

American companies spend more than $20 trillion a year on the raw materials, logistics, data centers and services that run the economy, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Most of that spending is managed on procurement and enterprise systems designed to record decisions rather than make them, with people filling the gaps the software leaves.

"Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot," said Jayakrishnan. "We built Freehand to close that gap, with AI Agents that decide, act and take accountability for outcomes."

Freehand's agents negotiate rates, enforce contract terms, manage suppliers, process payments and reconcile data inside a customer's existing systems, rather than producing recommendations for a person to act on.

## Tariffs Are Straining the Supply Chain Outsourcing Model

Large buyers have run this work through business process outsourcing contracts for about three decades, with offshore teams matching invoices to purchase orders, chasing exceptions and moving data between systems. Freehand's case is that tariffs, taxes and immigration policy are now pressing on that model, raising the cost of the labor and the complexity of the work at the same time. Industry estimates put the global BPO market at around $358 billion this year.

## Procure to Pay Is the First Workflow Freehand Automates

The company started on one process: checking and paying invoices across the supply chain, the procure to pay cycle. Its agents read contracts, negotiate with suppliers, catch billing leakage, process payments and close the loop with procurement. Freehand says customers in early deployments have recovered 5 to 10 percent of spend in complex categories, completed workflows five to seven times faster and shortened procure to pay cycles by more than 70 percent, while winding down outsourcing and BPO contracts.

"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 vice president of supply chain at Unilever.

The company's central technology is what it calls a Category Context Graph, a record of every decision, transaction and exception across a category of spend that combines documents and message threads with structured data from enterprise systems. Freehand says it gives the agents the working knowledge a long-serving buyer holds in their head, along with an audit trail for each decision, and that every agent it deploys adds to the graph.

"Shifting from building software for the user to building software that is the user meant we could drive far deeper transformation for our customers," said Manohar. "The difference between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests is context."

## AI Procurement Has Become a Funded Category

Coupa, SAP Ariba, Ivalua, Zycus, JAGGAER, Zip and Levelpath have all shipped procurement agents over the past two years, and Spendflo has made the same argument for its [AI procurement software](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/spendflo-flo-ai-procurement-software), that the coordination work around buying is what the agents should absorb. Zip raised $190 million at a $2.2 billion valuation in late 2024. Battery led Levelpath's $55 million Series B in 2025, giving it two positions in AI-native procurement. Agentic AI startups raised $2.66 billion in the first four months of 2026, more than double the same period a year earlier, across only 44 rounds.

"In Freehand we found an applied-AI company with a vertical wedge and tremendous customer love, proven at some of the world's largest companies where early signs of expansion were playing out," said Thakker. "Unlike co-pilots that simply answer questions, Freehand's Agents have enterprise context, make decisions, and take actions: this agency unlocks millions in savings for enterprises."

## Supply Chain Automation Across More Categories of Spend

Freehand plans to extend the agents to further supply chain processes and to more categories of spend, including logistics, direct materials and maintenance, repair and operations. The agents run inside the procurement, finance and collaboration tools customers already use rather than as a separate system.

## FAQ

**Q: Is AI taking over supply chain management?**
Not in the sense of running the function. What is being taken over is the processing underneath it. Freehand's agents handle defined workflows such as invoice checking, supplier negotiation and payment, and the company reports early deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health. Decisions about strategy, sourcing policy and supplier relationships still sit with people, and the agents' outputs are auditable because the company keeps a record of why each decision was made.

**Q: How is AI being used in procurement?**
In three broad ways. Reading, where models pull terms out of contracts, invoices, emails and chat threads that older systems could not process. Deciding, where agents apply contract and policy rules to approve, query or reject a transaction. Acting, where the agent executes the result in the buyer's own procurement, finance or payment systems. Freehand's version covers all three across the procure to pay cycle. Most established procurement vendors, including Coupa, SAP Ariba and Ivalua, now sell agents of some kind.

**Q: Will procurement survive AI?**
The function will. The volume of manual processing inside it is what shrinks. Freehand says customers redeploy staff to higher-value work as the agents take on invoice matching and exception handling, and that procure to pay cycles shorten by more than 70 percent. The company frames the saving as coming from the outsourcing contracts it replaces rather than from internal headcount.

**Q: Is outsourcing a dying concept?**
Not dying, but under pressure at the low-complexity end. Business process outsourcing is still a market of roughly $358 billion a year by industry estimates. What is changing is the economics of the work that made up much of it: tariffs, taxes and immigration policy have raised the cost of running high-volume transactional processing through offshore teams, and software that can now read unstructured documents removes the reason much of it was staffed by people in the first place.

**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)