Chennai-Focused AI startup Freehand bags $75 mn for agentic enterprise supply chains. Freehand, with a significant presence in Chennai, will scale its AI-powered supply chain platform as enterprises increasingly adopt autonomous software over traditional outsourcing. JULY 30, 2026, 12:53 PM Key Takeaways What actually matters. Freehand, an AI startup based in Chennai, raised $75 million to expand its autonomous supply chain platform. The funding round was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, contributing to a total of $100 million raised since 2024. San Francisco-based agentic AI startup Freehand, with a significant presence in Chennai, has raised $75 million in a funding round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, as it looks to expand its autonomous AI platform for enterprise supply chains, marking one of the largest funding rounds in the emerging category. The round also saw participation from PSP Growth, led by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, Nexus Venture Partners, and existing investors. With the latest raise, the startup has secured a total of $100 million in funding since its launch in 2024. Around half of Freehand's workforce is based in India, with significant operations in Chennai.

Freehand raises $75M to scale AI Teams managing Supply Chain spend for Fortune 500 companies. Freehand's AI Agents autonomously manage supply-chain spend for Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Dunkin', Pfizer and Cardinal Health. July 29, 2026 09:00 ET | Source: Freehand San Francisco, CA, July 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Freehand, whose AI agents manage supply-chain spend for Fortune 500 enterprises, today announced $75 million in funding co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker's venture capital PSP Growth, Nexus Venture Partners and others. Freehand founders Abhijeet Manohar and Nitin Jayakrishnan. American companies spend more than $20 trillion a year on the raw materials, logistics, data centers and services that power the U.S. economy, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. For decades, supply chain spend has been managed on legacy software and armies of outsourced labor. Freehand replaces this machinery with autonomous AI Teams that make decisions and take action to negotiate rates, enforce contracts, manage suppliers, process payments, and reconcile data within enterprise systems. This financing round follows Freehand's recent emergence from stealth with global deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health, as tariffs, taxes and immigration policies put increasing strain on the outsourcing model that has historically run global supply chains. Across early deployments, customers have recovered 5-10% of spend in complex categories, completed workflows 5-7x faster, and reduced procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%. As a result, organizations are redeploying their employees to higher-value work while reducing traditional outsourcing and BPO contracts. Freehand solves one problem exceptionally well: replacing the outsourced labor and legacy software used to audit and pay invoices across the supply chain. Its AI agents run the entire workflow - reading contracts, negotiating with suppliers, identifying leakage, processing payments and closing the loop with procurement - replacing outsourced teams and legacy tools that cost organizations tens of millions a year. "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 VP of Supply Chain at Unilever. Freehand is moving the dial on spend for enterprise. "Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot," said Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Freehand. "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." Nitin previously built and sold Pando, an enterprise SaaS platform for logistics. "The very nature of work is changing, with AI," said Abhijeet Manohar, co-founder of Freehand. "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." Freehand's central IP is its Category Context Graph, which captures every decision, transaction and exception across a spend category. By unifying the unstructured data buried in documents and communication channels with the structured data in enterprise systems, it gives the agents the situational knowledge of a tenured supply-chain expert, along with an audit trail explaining every decision. Every AI agent Freehand deploys is built on and continuously enriches the graph, creating a compounding intelligence effect where each decision improves the accuracy, context autonomy of the next. "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 Dharmesh Thakker, General Partner at Battery Ventures, who is joining Freehand's board. "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." "What stood out to us about Freehand wasn't just the technology, but the measurable business outcomes customers were achieving," said Gregoire Lehmann, partner at NewRoad Capital Partners. "Freehand is delivering immediate ROI by helping enterprises reduce overpayments and operating costs, improve audit accuracy, and automate highly manual supply chain finance workflows. We believe the company is well positioned to become the category leader in AI-native supply chain spend management, and we're excited to leverage NewRoad's deep network of enterprises to help expand the company's enterprise footprint." "America's industrial competitiveness relies on how effectively our largest companies operate," said Penny Pritzker, Founder and Chairman of PSP Partners & PSP Growth. "Freehand is one of a few companies converting frontier AI into measurable productivity gains across enterprise supply chains, with rigor, scale and accountability." About Freehand Freehand builds autonomous AI agents that run supply-chain spend for the world's largest enterprises - taking on procurement, supplier management, invoice and payment operations across complex categories such as logistics, direct materials and MRO. Built on Freehand's Category Context Graph, the agents reason across structured and unstructured data, understand contracts and policies, and execute decisions directly in collaboration tools and enterprise systems, delivering measurable savings and fully auditable outcomes without adding headcount or outsourcing contracts. Headquartered in San Francisco, Freehand is backed by Battery Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, NewRoad Capital Partners and others. Learn more at https://www.freehand.ai. Contact data. Release summary Freehand raises $75M to scale AI Teams managing Supply Chain spend for Fortune 500 companies.