Freehand, a San Francisco company building autonomous AI agents for enterprise supply chain spend, has raised $75 million in a Series B round co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners. The raise, announced on July 29, 2026, is notable less for its size than for where the money is pointed: while 2026’s agentic-payments buildout has mostly happened on the consumer checkout rails — Visa, Mastercard and Amex joining the x402 standards body, Adyen shipping its Agentic checkout product — the first AI agents actually trusted to commit large sums of corporate money have landed in the least glamorous corner of finance: supplier invoices.
That is the cross-vertical pattern worth watching. Card networks spent the first half of the year building permission rails so consumer agents can spend hundreds of dollars safely. Freehand’s agents are already deciding, negotiating and paying across procurement categories at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’ and Cardinal Health, according to the company’s funding announcement. The enterprise back office, not the checkout page, is where agentic money movement has quietly reached production scale.
The round included PSP Growth, the investment firm founded by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, alongside Nexus Venture Partners, FinTech Global reported. Battery Ventures general partner Dharmesh Thakker joins Freehand’s board. The company was founded in February 2024 by Chief Executive Officer Nitin Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, the pair behind logistics software firm Pando, which was sold to a strategic buyer in early 2026, Crunchbase News noted.
Jayakrishnan frames the opportunity as a labour arbitrage rather than a software upgrade. “Enterprises spend $16 billion a year on supply chain software and another $348 billion hiring people to do what this software cannot,” he said in the funding release. Put those two numbers together and the pitch writes itself: the addressable budget for agents is not the software line, it is the 20-times-larger payroll line sitting next to it — the same synthesis that has pulled Saris’ $28.8 million round for bank back offices and Ant International’s $1.2 billion Series A into adjacent corners of the same thesis this summer.
Customers are speaking on the record, which remains rare for agentic deployments. “Freehand marks one of the first full-scale agentic deployments at Unilever,” said Matt Algar of Unilever in the announcement. Freehand says early customers have recovered 5–10% of spending in complex categories, completed workflows five to seven times faster, and cut procure-to-pay cycles by as much as 70% — figures that come from the company and its named customers rather than an independent audit, a caveat worth keeping until third-party benchmarks exist.
Under the hood, Freehand’s differentiator is what it calls a Category Context Graph, which fuses structured enterprise data with the unstructured residue of real procurement — documents, emails, messages — so agents inherit the context human category managers carry in their heads. Co-founder Manohar’s one-line summary of the product philosophy: “The difference between an agent that acts and a chatbot that suggests is context,” he told Tech Funding News.
The context makes the timing legible. Agentic AI has been consolidating across financial software all summer: Backbase bought Kasisto to push agents into core banking in June, and Visa took agentic payments live with 30 European issuers in early July. Those moves target consumer and bank-side flows; Freehand’s bet is that corporate procurement — bigger tickets, messier data, fewer transactions — is where autonomy pays back fastest, because every recovered percentage point on a Fortune 500 category budget is measured in millions.
What happens next is a collision course. Incumbent spend-management suites cannot cede invoice-level autonomy to a two-year-old startup indefinitely, and the card networks’ agent-authentication rails will eventually reach B2B flows. When they do, the companies that already run agents against live supplier spend — with reference customers like Meta and Unilever on the record — will be the ones setting the integration terms. Expect the next 12 months of enterprise fintech funding to chase exactly this seam between procurement software and payments infrastructure.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
