Freehand, a San Francisco-based AI company building autonomous agents for enterprise spending and financial operations, has raised $75m as businesses look to automate procurement, supplier management and payment workflows.
The funding round was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with backing from PSP Growth, the investment firm founded by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, alongside Nexus Venture Partners and other investors. Battery Ventures general partner Dharmesh Thakker will join Freehand’s board as part of the investment.
The raise follows Freehand’s recent emergence from stealth mode, with the company already deployed across major enterprises including Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’ and Cardinal Health.
Freehand said businesses are facing growing pressure to improve efficiency as tariffs, taxation changes and labour market challenges increase the cost and complexity of managing global operations. The company believes traditional outsourcing models are increasingly unable to keep pace with enterprise demand for faster, more intelligent financial workflows.
The company claims early customers have recovered between 5% and 10% of spending in complex categories, completed workflows five to seven times faster and reduced procure-to-pay cycles by up to 70%. Freehand said these improvements allow finance and procurement teams to reduce manual work, improve visibility and focus employees on higher-value activities.
Freehand’s AI agents are designed to manage areas including procurement, supplier relationships, invoice processing and payment operations across categories such as logistics, direct materials and maintenance, repair and operations (MRO).
At the centre of the platform is Freehand’s Category Context Graph, which captures decisions, transactions and exceptions across individual spending categories. The technology combines structured enterprise data with information from documents, emails and messages, allowing AI agents to make decisions based on business context while maintaining an audit trail.
The company’s approach reflects a wider shift in enterprise technology towards agentic AI, with businesses increasingly moving beyond AI assistants that provide recommendations towards systems capable of executing tasks and managing workflows.
Freehand co-founder and CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan said, “Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot. We built Freehand to close that gap – with AI Agents that decide, act and take accountability for outcomes. This is the beginning of true autonomy in the enterprise.”
Freehand co-founder Abhijeet Manohar said, “The very nature of work is changing, with AI. Shifting from building software for the user to building software that is the user meant we could drive far deeper transformation for our customers. The difference between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests is context.”
Unilever global VP of supply chain Matt Algar said, “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.”
The investment highlights growing demand for AI infrastructure that can automate complex enterprise financial processes, with procurement, payments and spend management emerging as key areas where businesses are seeking greater efficiency and control.
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