Freehand raised $75 million co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and PSP Growth, the fund run by former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. Freehand's AI agents read contracts, negotiate rates with suppliers, process invoices and payments, and reconcile data inside enterprise systems, taking over work that large companies now hand to outsourced teams and legacy procurement software. Freehand emerged from stealth recently with deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health. Early customers recovered 5% to 10% of spend in complex categories and shortened procure-to-pay cycles by more than 70%, according to Freehand. CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan previously built and sold Pando, a logistics SaaS platform.
