San Francisco-based start-up Freehand has a simple pitch for prospective customers: it pledges to save them time and money. The business, which is today announcing it has raised $75 million of seed funding, has a laser focus on one area of supply chain spending, where large businesses the world over are struggling to stay on top of accounts payable.

“The crux of the interaction between every large enterprise and its suppliers comes when it receives an invoice for a product or service and has to decide whether or not to pay, or how much to pay,” explains Nitin Jayakrishnan, Freehand’s co-founder and CEO. “But those decisions rest on understanding the rich context of all your contracts and communications with each supplier; doing that work is hugely manually intensive.”

Accounts payable is far less binary than is often realized, Jayakrishnan points out. Deciding whether to settle an invoice isn’t just a question of checking whether the supplier delivered what was promised – there are potentially myriad other considerations. Maybe some of the product arrived late or was of poor quality; maybe the supplier was asked to make a last-minute change; maybe the invoice could technically be disputed but the business doesn’t want to jeopardize an important supplier relationship.

To make those judgements – and many more – large enterprises have traditionally relied on large teams of finance professionals, often outsourced to specialist firms offshore, who crunch through invoices one by one. Often, there is only capacity to check a sample of invoices; the rest are paid automatically, leaving the company vulnerable to over-spending and outright fraud.

Enter Freehand, which has developed a set of artificial intelligence (AI) powered agents to take over this work. “Our AI agents will decide whether to pay an invoice, act on that decision and take accountability for the outcome,” says Jayakrishnan.

To power that decision-making process, Freehand has built an AI engine capable of capturing a wide range of data relevant to an invoice – not just the basics of a supplier contract held on an ERP or CRM database, but also significant information buried in communication channels and company documents. The idea is to give the agent access to all the same information that finance professionals currently check and analyze before paying invoices.

If necessary, difficult cases can be referred to a human in the finance team, but in practice, says Jayakrishnan, its agents are making 99% of decisions without having to do so. Freehand says the first deployments of its agents have seen clients speed up their workflows by an average of seven times’ – and reduce spending by as much as 10% through work such as negotiations with suppliers and fraud detection.

Given that US companies alone spend more than $20 trillion a year on supply chain operations, that’s hugely significant. And while Freehand only emerged from stealth earlier this year – having originally launched in 2023 – the company has already signed a string of household name clients, including Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin' and Cardinal Health.

Today’s funding will support the company as it seeks to build out its customer base, particularly in industries such as retail. The company very deliberately targets large enterprise customers, which have the biggest and most complicate supply chain ecosystems.

“Our thesis is that vertical AI that goes deep rather than broad will deliver more value,” says Jayakrishnan of Freehand’s initial focus on a single aspect of supply chain work. In time, however, the business expects to use its data and experience to offer support with other supply chain challenges.

The company’s $75 million round is co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from PSP Growth – the fund led by former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker – and Nexus Venture Partners.

“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,” says Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, who is joining Freehand's board. Gregoire Lehmann, partner at NewRoad Capital Partners, adds: “Freehand is delivering immediate ROI by helping enterprises reduce overpayments and operating costs, improve audit accuracy and automate highly manual supply chain finance workflows.”

Pritzker is also a big fan. "Freehand is one of the few companies turning frontier AI into measurable productivity for enterprise supply chain operations – at the scale and accountability those environments demand,” she says.