Freehand Raises $75M Series B To Automate Fortune 500 Supply Chain Spend
figure — enterprise AI startup Freehand has raised $75 million in a Series B funding round to scale its autonomous AI agents, which manage complex supply chain spend and back-office operations for enterprise companies. Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led the financing, which included participation from Nexus Venture Partners and former U.S.
Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. With its latest capital injection, San Francisco-based Freehand has now raised $100 million. While Freehand declined to reveal its valuation, CEO and co-founder Nitin Jayakrishnan said it was “a significant step up” from the startup’s $25 million Series A that was raised in March 2024. The deal comes as tariffs, taxes, and immigration policy strain the outsourcing model that ran supply chains for decades. Freehand’s fundraise also lands amid an uptick in venture funding to supply chain and logistics-related startups, with 2026 on pace to deliver the strongest year since 2022, per Crunchbase data, with $6.2 billion raised by such companies in the first half of this year across 350 deals. Logistics roots Freehand co-founders Abhijeet Manohar (left) and Nitin Jayakrishnan. Freehand was founded in February 2024 by Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, two enterprise logistics veterans who previously co-founded and recently sold Pando, a SaaS transportation management system (TMS) and procure-to-pay system of record for large enterprise logistics. In early 2024, as AI transformation accelerated, Jayakrishnan and Manohar stepped away from operational roles at Pando, moving to board positions, to launch Freehand as an independent entity focused entirely on agentic AI. Pando continued operating under a newly appointed executive team before being sold to a strategic buyer in early 2026, marking a complete shareholder exit for the founders. Their experience building enterprise supply chain software convinced them that existing back-office paradigms were ripe for disruption. “We had been in this fairly archaic dinosaur of an industry for the last six to eight years,” Jayakrishnan told Crunchbase News in an interview. “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.” Beyond corporate cards While spend management platforms like Ramp focus on corporate cards, employee travel expenses, and bill payments, Freehand targets complex supply chain operations. That means that instead of processing standard receipts and routine approvals, its AI agents manage non-standard spending across logistics, raw materials, parts, and labor. The software operates inside existing company systems, performing tasks like reading contracts, policies, emails, and internal data to verify bills, track operational milestones, and handle vendor negotiations. Automating complex financial governance For large, global businesses, keeping track of supplier bills across complex shipping routes like the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz is difficult. Contracts are detailed, and checking whether large bills match actual work has historically required big back-office teams.
