- The company emerges from stealth with Fortune 500 customers already live, replacing manual workflows across accounts payable, procurement and supplier Collaboration
- Powered by an award-winning team, Freehand provides speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency across the entire supply chain spend for enterprises
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 09, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Freehand, a newly formed agentic AI studio for supply chain and finance teams, today announced its official launch at Manifest 2026, with a mission to deploy autonomous AI Teams that take over the operational work humans have been doing by hand across procure-to-pay.
Founded by Nitin Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar and headquartered in San Francisco, Freehand’s AI Teams read unstructured documents, emails and internal chats, reason across contracts and policies, make decisions and execute them – directly inside ERP, procurement, and finance systems alongside suppliers and customers. The product is already live at Fortune 500 enterprises, where early deployments have cut reconciliation and accounts payable (AP) cycle times by 80-90% and reduced manual procurement and sourcing efforts by 30-50%.
Freehand is built by the team behind Pi, the production-proven AI agent for freight and logistics that was recognized by TIME Magazine (Best Invention of 2025), Gartner (Visionary), Fast Company (Next Big Things in Tech 2025) and the World Economic Forum (Technology Pioneer). Pi proved that agentic AI could handle the messiest, most exception-heavy workflows in enterprise operations – not just in a demo, but in production and at scale for the world's largest shippers.
Freehand is Pi’s natural evolution: a platform that extends that same model across every category of supply chain spend.
Every large enterprise runs its supply chain and source-to-pay the same way. Thousands of people write emails to suppliers, cross-check invoices, chase exceptions and key in data between systems that don't talk to each other. It's slow, expensive, and hasn't fundamentally changed in 30 years.
"The dirty secret of enterprise operations is that companies spend tens of millions of dollars just to keep the lights on,” said Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Freehand. “Armies of people and outsourced teams doing tactical work like matching invoices, chasing exceptions, negotiating contracts and reconciling purchase orders is not strategic spend but margin erosion. Freehand saves you that time and money. Our AI Teams handle the operational grind with full decision context and audit trails so the savings flow straight to the P&L, freeing your people to focus on work that actually moves the business."
At the core of Freehand’s platform is a proprietary context graph, a living map that connects every decision, action and exception across an enterprise's supply chain. It stitches together unstructured communication (emails, Slack messages, Teams chats, documents, invoices) with structured system data (ERP, procurement, payment systems, supplier records) to build a complete picture of how and why every operational decision was made.
Because Freehand operates on the full decision context and not just clean data feeds, AI Agents can:
- Read unstructured inputs in whatever format they arrive, from rate confirmations to exception emails
- Reason across the real operational picture: contract terms, policies, historical decisions and live system data
- Execute directly in enterprise systems and partner portals with full traceability and audit logs
- Improve continuously because every decision enriches the graph and sharpens future accuracy
Most automation breaks at the edges, the exceptions, the judgment calls, the tribal knowledge that lives in someone's inbox. Freehand's context graph captures all of that, transforming an execution risk into institutional intelligence. The result is a manual process that become autonomous, with better accuracy and full auditability.
Supply chains are facing a compounding problem caused by rising complexity, tighter margins and a shrinking pool of experienced operations talent. The old playbook of hiring more people, relying on BPOs and buying another point solution doesn't scale anymore. Supply chain spend is the next largest domino. Freehand brings that same inevitability here, deploying AI Teams across the complex, exception-heavy operations where the real money is.
About Freehand
Freehand, formerly Pando, is an agentic AI platform for supply chain and spend management. Its autonomous AI Teams replace manual operations across procurement, supplier management and finance ops for complex categories like logistics, direct materials and MRO, reading unstructured data, reasoning across contracts and policies, and executing decisions directly in enterprise systems. Built by the award-winning team behind Pi and headquartered in San Francisco, Freehand delivers measurable cost savings, autonomous execution and fully auditable outcomes without adding headcount or BPOs. The company has been recognized by Gartner, TIME Magazine as Best Invention of 2025, Fast Company as the Next Big Thing in Tech 2025, the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer and Deloitte as one of the fastest-growing technology companies. To learn more visit www.freehand.tech
Media Contact
Skyya PR for Freehand
freehand@skyya.com
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/77b50722-b889-429d-8da9-5e582901ba2c
