AI Startup Freehand Raises $75 Million Led by Battery Ventures, NewRoad, Nexus
The startup says early customers recovered 5% to 10% of spend and completed workflows five to seven times faster.
- San Francisco-based startup Freehand announced today that it raised $75 million in seed funding to automate accounts payable processes for large enterprises using artificial intelligence agents.
- Enterprises traditionally rely on large teams to manually process invoices, leaving them vulnerable to fraud and overspending. Nitin Jayakrishnan, Freehand's co-founder and CEO, explains these decisions require understanding the "rich context" of supplier contracts and communications.
- Deployments at Meta and Unilever have seen workflows speed up by seven times, with agents handling 99% of decisions and reducing spending by as much as 10% through fraud detection and negotiations, according to the company.
- Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led the funding round, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and PSP Growth, the fund led by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, positioning Freehand in a competitive agentic market alongside Pivot.
- Freehand utilizes a "Category Context Graph" to integrate unstructured email data with structured ERP system information. As tariff pressures strain traditional supply-chain outsourcing, the company plans to expand automation beyond invoice processing into broader supply-chain infrastructure.
15 Articles
15 Articles
Freehand Raises $75M to Put AI Agents in Charge of Fortune 500 Supply Chain Spend
Every large enterprise runs on a paradox. The most consequential financial machinery in the company, the system that decides which invoices get paid, which contracts get enforced, and which suppliers get renegotiated, is also its least modernized. American companies spend more than $20 trillion a year on the raw materials, logistics, data centers and services that power the US economy, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And for decade…
Freehand raises $75M to put AI agents in charge of supply-chain spend
The startup, whose agents negotiate and pay across procurement for the likes of Unilever and Pfizer, is betting enterprises want software that acts, not software that suggests. Freehand, a startup whose AI agents take over the grunt work of managing what large companies spend on their supply chains, has raised $75 million. The round is […] This story continues at The Next Web
Coverage Details
Bias Distribution
- 46% of the sources are Center
Factuality
To view factuality data please Upgrade to Premium
