Freehand Recognized in the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Freight Audit and Payment Providers
Freehand redefines the freight audit and payment services with its dedicated AI Teams built to replace manual workflows across the entire supply chain spend for enterprises
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Freehand, an agentic AI studio for supply chain and finance teams, today announced it has been recognized as a representative vendor in the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Freight Audit and Payment Providers. Freight Audit and Payment (FAP) are part of a fast-growing market driven by demand for credible data insights and actionable insights to optimize logistics costs. As volatility persists across the supply chain industry, organizations increasingly rely on FAP providers to gain visibility and control over logistics spend.
In our view, the Gartner Market Guide highlights key industry trends and the growing importance of FAP providers in helping suppliers optimize their freight and parcel spend, increase visibility, and measure sustainability impacts. It also underscores the expansion of capabilities beyond traditional FAP, as companies like Freehand combine freight procurement, transportation, and freight insights, global trade management, and supply chain orchestration with agentic AI. Through its agentic AI platform, Freehand manages and executes source-to-pay operations, enabling organizations to move from insight to action across the entire supply chain operations.
“Enterprise teams are under pressure to make faster, more confident decisions amid constant disruption,” said Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Freehand. “In our view, this recognition in the Gartner Market Guide validates the role modern platforms play in bringing discipline, transparency and operation rigor to how organizations manage supply chain spend.”
We believe, as a global provider, Freehand is recognized for its ability to automate spend management from sourcing, negotiation, contracting and invoicing through payment processing. Freehand processes more than $50 billion in global freight payments annually, handling approximately 2.5 million transactions per month. Freehand supports payment processing in more than 20 languages and currencies, and its platform is connected to a global network of 100,000 pre-onboarded carriers.
With customers spanning consumer products, automotive, pharmaceuticals, retail, and chemical industries across North America and Asia, Freehand processes more freight payment volume than any other technology-first FAP provider. This scale, combined with the company's Category Context Graph architecture and autonomous execution capabilities, positions Freehand uniquely at the intersection of traditional freight audit services and next-generation agentic AI. As Gartner's recognition confirms, the future of FAP lies not in better dashboards or more sophisticated recommendations, but in AI systems that can own and execute the entire source-to-pay workflow—exactly what Freehand's AI Teams deliver today.
Gartner Market Guide for Freight Audit and Payment, Brian Day, Brian Whitlock, Matthew Beckett, 10 February 2026.
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About Freehand
Freehand 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.ai
Media Contact
Skyya PR for Freehand
freehand@skyya.com
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Freehand Recognized in the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Freight Audit and Payment Providers
Freehand, an agentic AI studio for supply chain and finance teams, today announced it has been recognized as a representative vendor in the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Freight Audit and Payment Providers.
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