Forgepoint, a New York startup building AI tools for manufacturing back offices, raised $9.8 million in seed funding on Wednesday, led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun. Angels from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi joined the round, the company said, though it declined to name them.
The young company reached seven figures in annual recurring revenue within six months of launching Frank, an AI agent that handles the entire request-for-quote workflow for machine shops and foundries. It's a problem CEO Jack Strauss watched firsthand during months spent touring plants across the industrial Midwest in early 2025.
"We knew that before we could solve the problem, we needed to understand it deeply," said Alex Pareto, Forgepoint's co-founder and chief technology officer, who previously ran engineering for Brex's spend-management division. What he and Strauss found was a quoting bottleneck: buyers expect responses in under 24 hours, but most shops still rely on manual processes that can stretch for days.
Gardner Intelligence's 2024/2025 Industrial Buying Influence survey bears that out. Nearly half of manufacturers now expect a vendor to turn around a quote within a day. Miss that window and the work goes elsewhere.
Frank reads incoming RFQs wherever they arrive (email, PDF attachments, CAD files), pulls out specs and quantities, flags missing details, and pings the buyer for clarification. The agent then plugs numbers into a shop's existing cost models, surfaces similar past jobs for context, and drafts a quote that a human can approve or adjust. Once sent, Frank logs the exchange in whatever CRM or ERP system the customer already uses. No separate dashboard. Users can interact by email, text or Slack.
Forgepoint claims integrations with more than 50 platforms, from Epicor and NetSuite to SAP, Sage and Acumatica. Deployments typically go live in under a month.
Speed is the selling point. Strauss said customers average a 55% cut in time-to-quote and a 30% jump in monthly throughput, which in practical terms means more bids out the door before buyers lose patience. "Speed is a competitive advantage, so we built Frank to keep jobs moving," he said.
Hundreds of sales reps, estimators and engineers now use the system weekly, according to the company. Named customers include Excal Inc., SIP Manufacturing, Metals of Honor, Gamma Foundries and Acra Cast. Chas Aday, founder of SIP Manufacturing, put it plainly: "Frank drafts and I can approve it in two minutes."
Strauss worked on advanced manufacturing at Bain before leading go-to-market at autonomous-aircraft startup Xwing through its acquisition by Joby Aviation. He also spent time at Northrop Grumman and holds an MBA from Stanford's business school. Pareto came to Forgepoint from Brex and earlier sold his YC-backed startup Demeanor to NTWRK, where he stayed on as director of engineering.
The seed capital will fund more deployments, deeper integrations and a hiring push across engineering, deployment strategy and sales. The company is currently recruiting for roles including head of deployment strategy and founding engineers, all based in New York. Forgepoint targets industries where custom work dominates: injection molding, steel mills, CNC machining, heat treatment shops.
Zach Fredericks, a principal at Primary, framed the pitch simply. "Forgepoint is giving those teams more capacity, starting with quoting," he said.
The startup said it is SOC 2 Type II certified and does not use one customer's data to train models for another shop, a distinction that matters in industries where proprietary manufacturing processes are closely guarded. Whether that promise holds as the company scales remains to be seen, but for now Forgepoint is betting that speed alone will be enough to win over an industry not known for embracing software quickly.
