Enterprise AI startup Freehand has raised $75 million in a Series B round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. The round brings the company's total funding to $100 million.
CEO and co-founder Nitin Jayakrishnan declined to disclose the valuation but described it as "a significant step up" from the company's $25M Series A closed in March 2024.
Born From Logistics Frustration
Freehand was founded in February 2024 by Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, both veterans of enterprise logistics. The pair previously co-founded Pando, a SaaS transportation management and procure-to-pay platform for large enterprises. In early 2024, they stepped back from operational roles at Pando to launch Freehand as an independent agentic AI play. Pando was subsequently sold to a strategic buyer in early 2026, completing a full founder exit.
Their years building enterprise supply chain software convinced them the industry's back-office model was overdue for disruption.
"We had been in this fairly archaic dinosaur of an industry for the last six to eight years. 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." — Nitin Jayakrishnan, CEO, Freehand
What Freehand Actually Does
Freehand is not a corporate card or expense tool. While platforms like Ramp focus on employee travel, card spend, and routine bill approvals, Freehand targets the far messier world of enterprise supply chain finance — logistics costs, raw materials, parts procurement, labor, and vendor contracts spanning dozens of countries.
Its AI agents operate inside existing enterprise systems, ingesting contracts, emails, internal policies, and operational data to:
- Verify supplier invoices against actual services delivered
- Track operational milestones across complex global shipping routes
- Negotiate billing discrepancies directly with vendors without escalating to human teams
- Manage procure-to-pay cycles across 60–70 countries and hundreds of currencies
The problem it solves is concrete. When a global logistics supplier sends an invoice for $16.9 million, verifying whether that number is accurate — against layered contracts, route deviations, service-level obligations — has historically required large specialist back-office teams operating largely on institutional knowledge.
"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." — Jayakrishnan
Measurable Outcomes
Freehand claims its platform delivers:
- 5–10% recovery of total spend across key categories
- 5x–7x faster completion of complex operational workflows
- 70%+ reduction in overall procure-to-pay cycle times
The company currently counts ~50 enterprise customers, including Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Cardinal Health, and autonomously processes billions in payments without human supervision.
Why the Timing Makes Sense
The raise lands at an inflection point for supply chain investment. Per Crunchbase data, supply chain and logistics startups raised $6.2 billion in the first half of 2026 across 350 deals — putting the year on pace to be the strongest since 2022. Macro pressures — tariffs, geopolitical disruption, shifting trade routes — are forcing enterprises to rethink operational models built on offshore outsourcing.
Dharmesh Thakker, General Partner at Battery Ventures, framed the opportunity bluntly:
"Supply chain and logistics management still runs on manual labor and repetitive workflows that are begging to be automated. Technology spending is a rounding error at just over $20 billion, which tells us AI has enormous room to drive efficiency."
Thakker cited Freehand's founder-market fit, its focus on the largest Fortune 500 shippers rather than intermediaries, and its clear ROI metrics as differentiating factors.
Implications for Enterprise Buyers
For enterprise operators, Freehand represents a shift from AI as a productivity layer to AI as an autonomous financial control system — one capable of touching daily global transactions without human sign-off. That's a meaningful trust threshold, and the company's traction with regulated, risk-averse customers like Pfizer and J&J suggests it's crossing it.
For founders building in the enterprise automation space, the Freehand story reinforces a clear pattern: domain depth plus agentic architecture is the combination attracting institutional capital right now — especially in industries where digital transformation stalled at the SaaS layer.
