Freehand
Autonomous AI agents optimize enterprise spend
Chief of Staff - Strategic Finance, BizOps
About the job
- A computer science undergraduate degree from a top-tier college in India or the United States.
- An MBA from Harvard Business School, Wharton, or Stanford.
- At least 2-4 years of experience in investment banking or private equity.
- At least 2-4 years of experience in an operating role such as business operations or strategic finance at a consumer technology or B2B software company.
- Hands-on financial modeling experience across go-to-market, product, technology, and operations.
- Ability to move between board-level strategy, management decision-making, and hands-on functional execution.
- Build the top-down financial model of the business as the intersecting output of the five pipelines and decompose it into functional models for sales, implementations, product, talent, and capital.
- Identify the dynamic binding constraint in each pipeline and at the company level, quantify the cost of each bottleneck, and assess the return on investment of unblocking it.
- Stand up dashboards for each pipeline and a consolidated business view covering leading indicators, throughput, conversion, cycle time, and unit economics.
- Partner with each function head to set weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals tied to the model and drive a prioritized list of debottlenecking initiatives across the company.
- Run weekly functional reviews and fortnightly business reviews alongside the chief executive officer.
- Own strategic initiatives across customer expansion, pricing, organizational design, cost optimization, and other high-leverage problems without an existing owner.
- Run board meetings end-to-end, including materials, narrative, follow-ups, investor materials, modeling, and process management.
- Founder or very early-stage startup experience.
About the company
Freehand builds autonomous AI Teams that run inside a client’s ERP, procurement, and finance systems to manage and govern complex supply chain spend for large enterprises. It reads unstructured data, reasons over structured data, and executes decisions to replace manual work and software seats, handling non-standard spend, invoice matching, exceptions, and vendor negotiations in logistics, raw materials, and labor. Its platform centers on a proprietary context graph that maps decisions and actions across the supply chain to coordinate judgment-heavy workflows, differentiating from point solutions. The goal is to cut operating costs and cycle times in procurement and finance by automating spend management at scale, with billions processed for customers like Meta, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Early VC
Total Funding
$75M
Headquarters
Chicago, Illinois
Founded
2026
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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.
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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
↓ -9%1 year growth
↓ -9%2 year growth
↓ -9%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.
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.
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 has raised $75 million in funding co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with backing from PSP Growth.