Freehand Launches Freehand Pay, Expanding AI Teams from Invoice Audit to Payment
New payment capabilities, supported by Stripe, allow Freehand’s AI Teams to audit, resolve, approve, pay and reconcile
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SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Freehand, the leading AI alternative to accounts payable and procurement labor, today launched Freehand Pay, a new payment automation solution that enables its agentic AI teams to autonomously move approved invoices through payment and reconciliation. Freehand’s agents already connect structured and unstructured data across ERP, TMS, procurement systems, EDI, email, contracts and supplier communications; audit charges against contracts, rates and policy; resolve exceptions directly with suppliers; and cost allocation to the right general ledger account. Previously, payment approval marked the end of the automated workflow, leaving finance teams to manage the operational handoffs and disbursement process across suppliers. Freehand Pay closes that gap, paying suppliers in their local currency through local rails, powered by Stripe.
Freehand Pay brings audit, exception resolution, cost allocation, payment and reconciliation into a single, continuous workflow designed to be autonomous and governed. Freehand Pay has been in use with a select group of Fortune 50 companies who partnered with Freehand in its development, with those customers reducing accounts payable cycle times by 80–90% while AI Teams handled 99% of underlying decisions in place of manual review. Freehand Pay is now available to all Freehand customers.
“Our AI Teams already determine what should be paid, but until now, they could not execute the payment themselves,” said Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Freehand. “Until now, customers still had to manage the operational handoff from approval through disbursement. With Freehand Pay, powered by Stripe’s payment infrastructure, customers can now entrust the entire procure-to-pay process to a team of AI agents who are trained on both their data and established operating precedent.”
Freehand’s growing network of payment partners help strengthen the global infrastructure behind Freehand Pay and support supplier payment execution across 150+ countries and 60+ currencies, including local rails in 110 of those countries. This allows suppliers to receive payment locally in their preferred currency rather than through traditional cross-border wires.
Freehand Pay extends Freehand’s AI Teams from data connection through payment reconciliation in one continuous workflow:
- Connect + Understand: Bring together structured and unstructured data across ERP, TMS, procurement systems, EDI, email, contracts, PDFs and supplier communications.
- Audit + Enforce: Validate charges against purchase orders, contracts, rates, policies and what actually happened — calculating true contractual liability rather than matching an invoice to a purchase order.
- Resolve: Investigate discrepancies, gather evidence, communicate with suppliers and close exceptions.
- Cost allocation: Assign GL accounts, cost centers and business units, including complex splits.
- Pay: Execute approved transactions through disbursement, in the supplier’s currency, over local rails.
- Reconcile: Keep financial records and transactions with a complete audit trail.
Freehand’s AI Teams are built with category-specific expertise, not a one-size-fits-all automation approach. By applying contracts, rate structures and historical exception patterns to complex spend categories, such as logistics and freight, warehousing and distribution, tariffs and global trade, the agents can identify issues, resolve discrepancies and validate payments with the rigor of a senior analyst. This specialized intelligence gives customers greater confidence to automate payment decisions.
Freehand Pay also helps customers turn payment into a source of return rather than a pure cost. Once invoices are audited and approved, suppliers can submit early-payment offers; accepted offers generate between $600,000 and $7 million in annual yield per $100 million of managed spend, depending on adoption.
“We use Freehand’s AI Agents to process invoice payments to our most complex suppliers,” said Matt Algar, SVP Customer Operations, North America at Unilever. “Freehand demonstrates how Agentic AI can be deployed across high stakes financial decisions in complex supply chains, and is accelerating the shift from software that supports decision-making to AI that orchestrates execution.”
Freehand’s AI Teams operate within controls established by the customer’s finance organization, including approval thresholds, policies and category-specific rules. Transactions outside those parameters are routed to a person for review, with every decision recorded in an audit trail. Freehand layers its own compliance controls over the payment rail: SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II certification, ISO 27001, and automated KYC, KYB, AML, and sanctions screening on every disbursement.
Freehand Pay is part of Freehand’s broader push toward autonomous finance: AI Teams that don’t simply recommend actions or automate individual tasks, but carry work through to a governed outcome.
“Our customers aren’t adopting a payments feature. They’re handing over a job. Moving money is where accountability starts, said Pratima Garg, enterprise product partner at Freehand. “My job is building and showing the proof behind every approval which gives finance teams the confidence to let payments run without a human touch. Today, Freehand processes millions in annual spend for leading global enterprises, including more than $20M annually for a single Fortune 50 consumer goods company.”
About Freehand
Freehand is the AI alternative to procurement and accounts payable (AP) labor. Its AI Teams take on complex work across procure-to-pay, from sourcing and procurement through audit, disputes, payment, reconciliation and spend intelligence. Powered by proprietary Context Graphs, Freehand connects enterprise systems, contracts, documents and communications to understand context, make decisions and take action. Enterprises retain governance through the Freehand AI Team Workspace, while each transaction generates spend intelligence to inform sourcing, procurement and finance decisions. The result is a new labor model for procure-to-pay that lowers structural cost, stops and recovers spend leakage, accelerates execution and turns every transaction into intelligence that improves sourcing, procurement and financial decisions.
Freehand’s customers include Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’, and Cardinal Health. The company has been recognized as a TIME Best Invention and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Headquartered in San Francisco, Freehand raised $75 million in July 2026 from Battery Ventures, NewRoad Capital Partners, PSP Growth, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at freehand.ai.
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