Freehand names Krshna Prashant as first marketing lead

Freehand is the company whose autonomous AI Teams manage supply-chain spend for Fortune 500 enterprises. It has announced the appointment of Krshna Prashant as its first Marketing Lead. She is the company’s first marketing hire in the United States.

The appointment comes weeks after Freehand raised $75 million in funding. Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led the round. Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker’s PSP Growth and Nexus Venture Partners participated.

What the CEO said

“We deliberately went looking for someone from the B2C world,” said Nitin Jayakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Freehand. “The best consumer marketers know how to make people feel something and act, and that instinct is exactly what enterprise software has been missing. Krshna has done that at scale across two continents. Bringing a B2C sensibility to B2B is how we intend to build a brand people remember, not just a product they buy.”

The role

As Freehand’s first marketing hire in San Francisco, Prashant is responsible for building Freehand’s brand, narrative, and go-to-market function from the ground up. The role defines how a category-creating AI company explains itself to the world’s largest enterprises.

Freehand’s agents already process billions of dollars in payments across 60 to 70 countries. Customers include Meta, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer.

What Prashant said

“Freehand is doing something that has never been done at this scale, replacing legacy software and outsourced labor with AI Teams that actually make decisions and take action inside enterprise systems,” said Krshna Prashant, Marketing Lead at Freehand. “My job is to give that a voice. As the first marketing hire in the U.S., this is a rare chance to build a category, not just market a product.”

Prashant joins Freehand after nearly a decade of leading marketing campaigns for some of the fastest-growing consumer and technology companies across two continents.

Background

Prashant is a marketing leader with 9+ years of experience spanning Europe and Southeast Asia. Her expertise covers product marketing, partner marketing, go-to-market strategy, and insight-driven positioning.

Most recently she was Head of Campaigns for EU & Turkey at Delivery Hero. She drove product adoption and co-marketing activation across seven-plus European markets. She managed a multi-million-euro promotional budget. She aligned C-level stakeholders and country general managers on integrated commercial and marketing growth plans.

Earlier, as Head of Marketing at Flash Coffee in Singapore, she led all marketing activations during a period of 30+ store launches. She built and managed a nine-person team. She reached 80% unaided brand awareness through integrated campaigns.

Prashant began her career at Uber. There she led CRM and in-app communications for UberPOOL and driver lifecycle initiatives. She then joined Grab as Brand Marketing Manager for Southeast Asia, leading regional campaigns across eight markets.

Recognition

At Grab, Prashant led the creation of the company’s first ESG and Social Impact Report. It ran as the “Personalised Social Impact Reports” campaign. It won Silver at the WARC Prize for Asian Strategy (2020).

The campaign used customer data and mobile technology to reframe and personalise Grab’s social impact across Southeast Asia. It drove measurable gains in brand metrics.

Prashant holds a BBA with a double major in Marketing and Strategy from Singapore Management University. She is also a writer, publishing on narrative and marketing through her Substack, Halfway Home.

About Freehand

Freehand builds autonomous AI agents that run supply-chain spend for the world’s largest enterprises. They take on procurement, supplier management, and invoice and payment operations. These cover complex categories such as logistics, direct materials, and MRO.

The agents are built on Freehand’s proprietary Category Context Graph. They reason across structured and unstructured data, understand contracts and policies, and execute decisions directly in enterprise systems. They deliver measurable savings and fully auditable outcomes without adding headcount or outsourcing contracts.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Freehand is backed by Battery Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, NewRoad Capital Partners, and others. Learn more at freehand.ai.