Chennai: Freehand, an AI startup focusing on autonomous supply chain management, has closed $75 million. It aims to capture enterprise spending on legacy software and outsourced labour in the supply chain with its autonomous agents that make decisions and take action. Agents can negotiate rates, enforce contracts, manage suppliers and process payments, it said.Freehand has deployed at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer. Founded by Nitin Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, San Francisco headquartered Freehand’s half its team in India, with significant operations in Chennai. Nitin previously built Pando, an enterprise SaaS platform for logistics.Responding to a query from TOI, Nitin Jayakrishnan said the company is a native AI business that runs supply chains rather than software to assist. It’s different from traditional software as a service, he added. “Our real IP is the supply chain context graph, a deep domain specific and company-specific workflow and knowledge captured by the agent. We also orchestrate across 18 different models, giving the customer control over where their data is used,” he said“Additionally, we own the outcome processing payments, taking accountability for accuracy. If the agent does not fully autonomously process the transaction, we do not get paid. This is true services as software ”Jayakrishnan added.Abhishek Sharma, Partner, Nexus Venture Partners, said, “Freehand represents a fundamental shift, from software that assists people to autonomous teams that own outcomes”.The funding was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from former US-based PSP Growth, Nexus Venture Partners and others.
