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This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/freehand-raises-$75m-to-put-ai-agents-in-charge-of-fortune-500-supply-chain-spend.
Freehand raised $75M from Battery Ventures and NewRoad to scale AI agents managing supply chain spend for Meta, Pfizer and J&J, recovering up to 10% of spend.
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Freehand, the San Francisco agentic AI company whose autonomous agents manage supply chain spend for Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health, has raised $75 million co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker's PSP Growth and Nexus Venture Partners. The company targets the gap between the $16 billion enterprises spend annually on supply chain software and the $348 billion they spend on people doing what that software cannot, inside a $20 trillion US supply chain operations base. Early Fortune 500 deployments report 5 to 10% of spend recovered in complex categories, workflows completed 5 to 7x faster, procure-to-pay cycles cut by more than 70%, and, per Forbes, 99% of decisions made without human referral. The core IP is the Category Context Graph, a compounding knowledge layer that unifies structured ERP data with the unstructured contracts, emails and chats where supply chain decisions actually live, giving every agent an audit trail for every action. The round lands as Gartner forecasts agentic SCM software spend growing from under $2 billion in 2025 to $53 billion by 2030, and as tariff volatility strains the outsourcing model that has run global supply chains for decades. What is Freehand and what did it raise? Freehand is a San Francisco agentic AI company whose autonomous AI agents manage supply chain spend, auditing invoices, negotiating with suppliers, and processing payments, for Fortune 500 companies including Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health. On July 29, 2026 it announced $75 million co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from PSP Growth (Penny Pritzker) and Nexus Venture Partners. Customers report recovering 5 to 10% of spend and completing workflows 5 to 7x faster.