About Freehand

Most AI companies are building tools. We're building the worker.

Freehand is the AI Team that runs Accounts Payable and spend operations for the world's largest enterprises, negotiating rates, enforcing contracts, managing suppliers, processing payments, and reconciling data across enterprise systems. It's work that's always required armies of analysts, BPOs, and offshore teams to keep supply chains running.

The tech industry has spent years competing for a $16B software market. We're going after the $348B enterprises spend on labor instead, building the AI Team that doesn't promise incremental efficiency gains, but owns the outcome, with the ROI to prove it. Meta, Unilever, J&J, Pfizer, and Cardinal Health are already running parts of their operations on Freehand, and we're just getting started.

The Role & The Team

Freehand is seeking a Product Marketing Lead to own positioning, pricing, launches, and sales enablement as we expand into new spend categories. You'll define the narrative, shape how we price and package it, ship the launches, and arm sales to win, as our AI Team grows from freight and logistics into new categories across the enterprise.

Positioning & Narrative: Own Freehand's core positioning, why an AI Team is a different category from an AI tool, and keep it sharp as the product, competition, and market move fast.

Roadmap & Launch: Own go-to-market for new spend categories, and the expansion motion once we're in: how customers move from an initial use case to broader adoption. Turn the roadmap into launch plans and messaging that drive adoption.

Pricing & Packaging: Partner with product, finance, and sales to price and package Freehand as we expand, translating outcome-based value into models that make sense to a CFO evaluating AI against headcount and BPO spend.

Competitive Intelligence: Track the landscape, legacy BPOs, point-solution AI tools, and emerging agentic startups, and turn it into positioning and battle cards that hold up in a live deal.

Sales Enablement: Arm sales with what they need to win: battle cards, objection handling, and category-specific pitches that turn narrative into deals.

Cross-Functional GTM: Partner with events, growth, and marketing on how Freehand shows up in the market as we scale.

Who You Are

You obsess over the buyer. You speak fluently to what keeps a CFO, CPO, or Chief Supply Chain Officer up at night, and just as fluently to the GBS/Shared Services, AP, and Procurement leaders who own the pain day to day.
You close the loop. You've built a system for getting real customer and market signal back to product and leadership, not just collected it in a doc.
You've launched new products or categories. You can turn a roadmap into a launch plan and adoption strategy, not just a press release.
You think like a seller. You know what a rep needs in the room to beat a competitor or handle an objection, and you build narrative and content around that.
You know how to land and expand. You've built the motion that takes a customer from an initial use case to broader footprint and spend over time.
You're comfortable in category-creation mode. The market doesn't have settled language for what Freehand does yet, and you want to help define it.
You work well across functions. You've partnered with events, growth, sales, and product to pull off a launch, not just messaging in isolation.

What You Bring (At the Minimum)

6+ years in product marketing, owning positioning, launches, pricing/packaging, and sales enablement for a technical, enterprise product.
Experience partnering directly with product, sales, finance, and executive leadership to launch new products or categories.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Bachelor's degree required.

An ideal candidate also has:

Experience in enterprise SaaS, fintech, supply chain, or AI/agent categories.
A track record of launching new products or expanding into new markets at a fast-growing company.
Experience shaping pricing and packaging for a technical or outcome-based product.
Experience building sales enablement materials that measurably moved win rates or deal velocity.
Comfort operating in an early-stage environment without an inherited playbook.

Working at Freehand

Series B, ~100 people across the US and India. Big enough to have infrastructure, small enough that your work is visible. We run on five core operating principles; these are not values-on-a-wall, this is the exact philosophy we built our AI agents on :

Context Before Confidence. We get in, ask (a ton of) questions, connect the dots ourselves and move fast. No passengers, no hand-holding. The amount of confidence you'll have in Week 1 is directly proportional to the context strive to gain.
Decisions, not Recommendations. Freehand folks decide, they don't present options. You'll have real autonomy, and real accountability to match.
High Agency, High Trust. We won't manage you closely or ask you to escalate every call. Act, share your reasoning, and course-correct when needed. That's the contract.
Accountability is the Product. When something goes wrong — and it will — we name it, learn from it, and move on. No politics, no cover. Just fix it.
The Work That Remains is the Work That Matters. We actively cut low-value work. What lands on your plate is there because it matters — and can only be done by you.

We proudly offer the following Benefits to all our full-time employees:

Take what you need Vacation Policy
Full health coverage (with multiple gold-standard carriers across medical, dental & vision)
Life Insurance and Disability benefits
HSA/FSA Access
401(k) with a 4% Employer Match
Fully-paid Parental Leave
Monthly home-internet costs

Equal Opportunity

Freehand hires on merit — your thinking, your track record, your potential — without regard to race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, or any other protected characteristic. If you meet most of the criteria above but not all of it, apply anyway. We care more about your willingness to learn & take initiative than whether your resume maps perfectly to every line.

About the company

Freehand provides autonomous AI Teams that operate inside enterprise ERP, procurement, and finance systems to manage complex supply chain spend for large corporations. It reads unstructured data, reasons over structured data, and executes decisions, replacing much of human headcount and software seats. The platform uses a proprietary context graph to map decisions and actions across the supply chain, enabling agents to handle non-standard spending, invoice matching, exceptions, and vendor negotiations in logistics, raw materials, and labor. The goal is to cut operating costs and cycle times in procurement and finance at scale, with customers like Meta, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer processing billions and seeing 70-90% reductions in procure-to-pay cycles and 5-10% spend recovery; Freehand has raised about $100 million from Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Early VC

Total Funding

$75M

Headquarters

Chicago, Illinois

Founded

2026

Get referred to Freehand

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

On July 29, 2026, Freehand raised $75 million from Battery and NewRoad.
Freehand says 50 customers now process billions across 60 to 70 countries.
September 21, 2026 marketing hire Krshna Prashant signals aggressive enterprise category creation.

What critics are saying

Freehand already handles payments; one credential breach or bad execution triggers immediate customer shutdown.
Meta, Unilever, J&J, and Pfizer concentrate reputational risk and procurement leverage.
Autonomous spend agents face CIO and CISO resistance until 2026 audit controls prove durable.

What makes Freehand unique

Freehand embeds autonomous agents inside ERP stacks, not a front-end dashboard.
Its Category Context Graph compounds decision history across procurement, payments, and exceptions.
Founders Nitin Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar previously sold Pando to enterprise buyers.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Life Insurance
Disability Insurance
Health Savings Account/Flexible Spending Account
Paid Vacation
Phone/Internet Stipend
Flexible Work Hours
401(k) Retirement Plan
401(k) Company Match

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

-1%

1 year growth

-3%

2 year growth

-3%

The Des Moines Register

Oct 6th, 2026

Trax Technologies files Legal action against Freehand.

Trax Technologies files Legal action against Freehand. Distributed by EIN Presswire Great companies have spent time and money to create an FAP market that is based on trust and accuracy. We took this step to protect ourselves, our customers, our competitors and the overall market." - Blake Tablak, CEO IRVING, TX, UNITED STATES, October 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ - Trax Technologies, Inc. today announced that it has filed a complaint against Freehand Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case is Trax Technologies, Inc. v. Freehand Inc., Case No. 3:26-cv-10884, filed September 24, 2026. The complaint asserts claims for false advertising under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125, and trade libel under California common law. It alleges that statements about Trax's Prizma.AI platform published in Freehand's marketing materials, including a comparison page, an alternatives article, ranked comparison articles, and case studies, were false or misleading. Trax seeks preliminary and permanent injunctive relief, damages, and disgorgement of profits. Trax has demanded a jury trial. Trax is represented by John F. Baughman, Nathaniel Marmon, and Alexander Kalyniuk of Baughman Kroup Bosse PLLC (https://www.bkbfirm.com), and Sam Ferguson and Ann Cappetta of Ferguson Law PC (https://www.fergusonlawpc.com/about). About Trax Technologies Trax is the global, digital leader in spend and compliance management solutions. We empower organizations with globally complex supply chains to gain greater control and visibility, delivering enterprise-wide efficiency, maturity, and value. Trax's Prizma.AI platform supports more than 125 enterprise customers across 120+ countries and manages more than $22 billion in freight spend. Media Contact Megan Caldwell [email protected] 909 Lake Carolyn Parkway Suite #230 Irving, Texas, USA 75039 Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above. Media gallery Information contained on this page is provided by an independent third-party content provider. XPRMedia and this Site make no warranties or representations in connection therewith. If you are affiliated with this page and would like it removed please contact [email protected]

StartupHub AI

Sep 21st, 2026

Freehand hires B2C marketer to sell AI Teams.

Freehand hires B2C marketer to sell AI Teams. Freehand tapped B2C veteran Krshna Prashant as first US Marketing Lead to brand AI Teams that execute spend inside enterprise systems. StartupHub.ai Staff Key Takeaways * 1 Freehand named Krshna Prashant its first US marketing lead on Sept. 21, 2026. * 2 Its AI Teams process billions in payments across 60 to 70 countries for Meta, J&J and Pfizer. * 3 The hire follows a $75M round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners. Freehand named Krshna Prashant its first marketing lead in the United States on September 21, tasking her with selling autonomous AI Teams that already process billions in payments inside enterprise systems at Meta, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. The appointment comes weeks after a $75 million round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with PSP Growth and Nexus Venture Partners participating. CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan said the company deliberately hunted in B2C because the best consumer marketers make people feel and act, an instinct he said enterprise software has missed. Prashant will build Freehand's brand, narrative and go-to-market function from scratch in San Francisco, defining how a category-creating company explains agents that make decisions and take action. The product surface is not a dashboard but agents embedded in source-to-pay and ERP stacks, operating remotely through integrations that approve, reconcile and release payments across 60 to 70 countries. Remote execution at that privilege level raises the stakes, since an agent authorized to move money becomes a high-value target if its credentials, prompts or tool permissions are compromised. Freehand has not detailed in this announcement how it scopes least privilege, logs agent actions or isolates payment rails, which a CISO buyer will want before granting autonomous spend authority. Prashant joins after nine years across Europe and Southeast Asia, most recently as Head of Campaigns for EU and Turkey at Delivery Hero where she ran product adoption and co-marketing across seven plus markets on a multi-million-euro budget. Earlier she led marketing at Flash Coffee in Singapore through 30 plus store launches, managing a nine-person team to 80 percent unaided brand awareness, after stints leading CRM at Uber and brand marketing at Grab across eight markets. At Grab she created the Personalised Social Impact Reports campaign, the company's first ESG and Social Impact Report, which won Silver at the WARC Prize for Asian Strategy in 2020. She holds a BBA in Marketing and Strategy from Singapore Management University and publishes on narrative and marketing via her Substack Halfway Home. If Freehand can prove its agents act safely inside live financial systems, Prashant's B2C storytelling will have something enterprise buyers actually believe. (C) 2026 StartupHub.ai. All rights reserved. You may not republish this article in full without a license. Search engines and AI research tools may crawl and summarize for reference. Bulk reproduction or model training requires a license. See our terms. Discussion. Join the conversation below StartupHub.ai Staff Editorial team The staff writers of StartupHub.ai, ranging from investment analysts to avid AI tool users, early adopters and critical enthusiasts. Backgrounds span engineering, business and the arts. We hold every piece to rigorous standards of research and review.

Analytics India Magazine

Jul 30th, 2026

Chennai-Focused AI startup Freehand bags $75 mn for agentic enterprise supply chains.

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.

GlobeNewswire

Jul 29th, 2026

Freehand raises $75M to scale AI Teams managing Supply Chain spend for Fortune 500 companies.

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.

StartupHub AI

Jul 29th, 2026

Freehand secures $75M for AI Supply Chain.

Freehand secures $75M for AI Supply Chain. Freehand secured $75 million in a funding round to scale its autonomous AI agents managing supply chain spend for Fortune 500 companies. Freehand, a company deploying AI agents to autonomously manage supply chain spend for Fortune 500 giants, announced a $75 million funding round. The investment was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from PSP Growth and Nexus Venture Partners. This Freehand AI funding round underscores a shift from assistive software to autonomous systems in enterprise operations. American companies spend over $20 trillion annually on supply chain essentials, a sector long reliant on legacy software and extensive outsourced labor. Freehand's AI Teams are designed to replace this, handling tasks from contract negotiation and supplier management to payment processing and data reconciliation. Emerging from stealth, Freehand already boasts deployments with Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin', and Cardinal Health. These early implementations have shown customers recovering 5-10% of spend in complex categories, completing workflows 5-7 times faster, and shortening procure-to-pay cycles by over 70%. This allows companies to redeploy human teams to higher-value work while scaling back costly outsourcing contracts. Freehand's initial focus is on automating invoice checking and payment across the supply chain. Its AI Agents manage the entire workflow, from reading contracts and negotiating with suppliers to identifying leakage and processing payments, tasks that typically involve large outsourced teams and outdated tools. Matt Algar, Global VP of Supply Chain at Unilever, noted that Freehand represents one of Unilever's first full-scale agentic deployments, marking a pivotal shift towards software that actively runs the supply chain. Nitin Jayakrishnan, Freehand's co-founder and CEO, stated, "Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot." He added, "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." Co-founder Abhijeet Manohar emphasized the shift from building software for users to building software that is the user, enabling deeper customer transformations. He highlighted that the distinction between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests lies in its contextual understanding. Central to Freehand's technology is its Category Context Graph. This proprietary IP captures every decision, transaction, and exception within a spend category, integrating unstructured data from documents and communications with structured enterprise system data. This provides agents with the situational knowledge of a seasoned supply chain expert, complete with an audit trail for every decision. Each agent enriches this graph, continually improving accuracy and autonomy. Dharmesh Thakker, General Partner at Battery Ventures and new Freehand board member, praised Freehand as an applied-AI company with a strong vertical focus and significant customer loyalty. He stressed that Freehand's agents, unlike mere co-pilots, possess enterprise context, make decisions, and take actions, unlocking millions in savings for clients. The application of AI agents for supply chain automation represents a substantial leap. Gregoire Lehmann, Partner at NewRoad Capital Partners, highlighted the measurable business outcomes Freehand delivers, including reduced overpayments, lower operating costs, and improved audit accuracy. He believes Freehand is poised to lead the AI-native supply chain spend management category. Penny Pritzker, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of PSP Growth, underscored Freehand's role in translating frontier AI into tangible productivity for enterprise supply chain operations, meeting demands for scale and accountability. (C) 2026 StartupHub.ai. All rights reserved. Do not enter, scrape, copy, reproduce, or republish this article in whole or in part. Use as input to AI training, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, or any machine-learning system is prohibited without written license. Substantially-similar derivative works will be pursued to the fullest extent of applicable copyright, database, and computer-misuse laws. See our terms. Discussion. Join the conversation below

Freehand

Product Marketing Lead

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