Investment Associate - Compute

AI Sales Rep startup Forgepoint raises $9.8M to help manufacturers quote faster. Pet Age Staff//October 14, 2026// American manufacturers can often make a part faster than they can get a quote back to the customer asking for it. That mismatch is the result of decades of automation reaching the shop floor, but rarely the office around it. Forgepoint is tackling that with Frank, an AI Inside Sales Rep built for manufacturing. Frank works alongside quoting teams across the emails, documents, pricing logic, and systems they already use, helping them move from incoming request to customer-ready quote far faster. Forgepoint recently announced a $9.8 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun, with angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel, and SoFi also participating. The funding will bring Frank to more manufacturers, deepen integrations with the systems they already use, and grow its world-class team. Frank analyzes part files, prepares pricing using each manufacturer's own cost model, routes engineering work for human review, and follows up with the customer after approval. Engineers, estimators, and salespeople keep the technical and commercial decision making, while Frank handles the administrative work between them. Forgepoint reached a seven-figure ARR within six months of Frank's launch. Hundreds of engineers, estimators, and sales reps now use Frank each week, and across customers monthly quote throughput is up an average of 30% while time-to-quote has fallen by more than 55%. From Silicon Valley to the American Heartland Before Forgepoint, CEO Jack Strauss spent his career in industrials at Northrop Grumman, Bain & Company's Advanced Manufacturing practice, and aerospace systems integrator Xwing. He kept seeing the same disconnect: manufacturers invested heavily in automating the shop floor, while everything before and after production still moved through email, spreadsheets, and aging enterprise systems. In early 2025, Strauss and co-founder Alex Pareto, formerly Head of Engineering for Brex's Spend Management organization, spent months touring plants across the Midwest, shadowing employees and studying their processes to find where the bottlenecks were and why. "In those early days, we simply wanted to learn, as if we had been hired to do the job ourselves. We knew that before we could solve the problem, we needed to understand it deeply" said Alex Pareto, Co-Founder and CTO. The two came away convinced that the frontier AI developing in front of them in Silicon Valley could remove many of the bottlenecks they were seeing on factory floors across the Midwest. Starting with Inside Sales Inside Sales was the natural starting point. It is directly tied to revenue: a shop's capacity to answer RFQs determines how much business it wins. Second, when it comes to winning jobs, speed matters now more than ever. A 2025 Gardner Intelligence study found that nearly 50% of manufacturers expect a vendor response within 24 hours. That is a hard target when the typical RFQ arrives as an email with several attachments and missing specifications. An estimator may need to contact the customer, find similar jobs, build a cost model, secure engineering approval, apply margins, enter pricing into the ERP, generate the quote, update the CRM, and manage follow-up. Expert judgment is critical for a few of those steps. The handoffs and data entry around them stretch the process from hours into days or weeks. "We kept meeting manufacturers with strong demand and capable teams, but their best people were spending hours on administrative work. Speed is a competitive advantage, so we built Frank to keep jobs moving and free skilled operators to focus on the decisions only they can make," said Jack Strauss, CEO and Co-Founder of Forgepoint. How Frank works Frank joins a manufacturer like a new employee. He gets an email address at the company's domain and learns the shop's operating procedures, pricing rules, and approval requirements. When an RFQ arrives, he reads the email and attachments, flags missing requirements, and contacts the buyer for clarification. He prepares the quote using the manufacturer's own cost model, surfaces similar historical jobs, and routes the draft to the right reviewer. After approval, he creates the final document in the company's template, sends it, manages follow-up, and records the correspondence. Because quoting and pricing look radically different from shop to shop, Forgepoint configures Frank around how each one already works. At a metal service center Frank matches material lists and cut lengths against the catalog, applies customer-specific pricing, and checks inventory. At a foundry he reviews part files, gathers missing drawing specifications from the buyer, and prepares a first draft for an engineer. Across injection molding, automation, fabrication, stamping, and machining, the day-to-day differs but the goal is the same: quote faster, quote more, and win more deals. Early customer results On average, Forgepoint customers increase monthly quote throughput by 30% and cut time-to-quote by more than 55%, giving skilled operators more time back in their day."Before Forgepoint, we were building quotes by hand and barely keeping up. Now, Frank drafts and I can approve it in two minutes. I'm spending less time entering data and more time serving my customers," said Chas Aday, Founder and CRO of SIP Manufacturing. As Frank works, it also preserves the emails, attachments and reasoning behind every decision, building a memory of how each shop prices work. That matters as veteran employees retire and manufacturers risk losing years of pricing logic, customer preferences and exceptions that live in their heads and inboxes. "A manufacturer's ability to grow depends on how much work its team can quote, plan, and manage," said Zach Fredericks, Principal at Primary Venture Partners. "Forgepoint is giving those teams more capacity, starting with quoting. We backed Jack and Alex because they understand the details of that work and have a clear ambition to bring the same approach across the entire manufacturing back office."

Forgepoint, a startup building AI agents for manufacturing, has raised $9.8 million in seed funding. Primary and a16z speedrun led the round, according to the article's headline. Chief executive officer Jack Strauss shared the news exclusively with Axios. Investment in manufacturing technology is rising as AI startups automate labour-intensive production.