Handshake Solutions: AI-Powered Agreement Management for Retail Businesses
How Handshake Solutions Helps Retailers and Suppliers Manage Agreements?
Handshake Solutions is building an AI-powered agreement management platform designed specifically for the retail industry. Despite the scale and sophistication of modern retail operations, many commercial agreements between retailers and suppliers are still managed using a combination of emails, spreadsheets, presentations, and disconnected systems. This often creates inefficiencies, delays, compliance risks, and limited visibility into contractual commitments. Handshake aims to centralize these workflows within a single platform where retailers and suppliers can create, negotiate, store, manage, and execute commercial agreements more effectively.
The platform supports a wide range of retail agreements, including joint business plans (JBPs), commercial trading agreements, pricing negotiations, customer investment plans, retail media commitments, and supplier performance programs. It can operate independently or integrate with enterprise systems such as SAP, Oracle, and Blue Yonder, allowing organizations to connect commercial planning directly with operational execution. By bringing negotiations, agreement management, workflow automation, and performance tracking into one environment, Handshake seeks to modernize an area of retail that has historically remained highly manual.
Handshake Solutions Recently Raised $3.2 Million Funding to Scale Their AI-Powered Native Platform
Handshake Solutions recently announced a $3.2 million funding round from Triple Point, Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company, and Octopus Ventures to accelerate growth and expand its AI-native retail agreement management platform. The investment reflects growing interest in industry-specific AI software that addresses operational challenges within large enterprise sectors. While much of the current AI market focuses on horizontal productivity tools, Handshake represents a different category of software designed around highly specialized workflows unique to retail organizations. The new capital will help the company enhance product capabilities, scale customer adoption, and continue developing AI-driven features that improve negotiation workflows, commercial planning, and agreement execution.
Investor confidence also highlights the increasing importance of digital collaboration between retailers and suppliers as supply chains become more complex and data-driven. Rather than treating agreements as static documents, Handshake views them as operational assets that should actively inform planning, execution, and performance management. As retail businesses continue searching for ways to improve efficiency and reduce administrative complexity, platforms that connect commercial agreements directly to operational outcomes may become increasingly important across the industry.
Why AI-Powered Agreement Management Matters for Retail Businesses?
Retailers and suppliers manage thousands of commercial decisions that directly influence revenue, margins, promotions, inventory planning, media investments, and customer outcomes. Yet much of the information governing these decisions often exists across fragmented systems and unstructured documents. This creates challenges around compliance, accountability, and execution. Handshake’s platform addresses this problem by creating a shared source of truth for commercial agreements while using AI to reduce administrative workload and improve visibility. Teams across trading, operations, finance, leadership, and retail media functions can access the same agreement data, helping ensure commitments are tracked consistently throughout their lifecycle.
The company also focuses on reducing contract leakage, a common issue where agreed commercial terms are not fully executed or monitored. By digitizing workflows and automating manual processes, Handshake allows retail organizations to spend less time managing paperwork and more time focusing on strategic supplier relationships and commercial performance. As retailers continue investing in digital transformation, agreement management is increasingly becoming a critical operational layer rather than a back-office function.
Handshake is targeting a surprisingly underserved area of retail technology by modernizing how retailers and suppliers manage commercial agreements. If the company can successfully digitize and automate these workflows at scale, agreement management could become a strategic source of operational efficiency rather than an administrative burden.