- Forgepoint raised a $9.8 million seed round led by Primary and a16z speedrun.
- Forgepoint says Frank hit seven-figure annual recurring revenue within six months of launch.
- CloudNC, Isembard, and Plato have each raised funding to address related problems since February.
American manufacturers can often make a part faster than they can send back a price, according to Forgepoint. The New York startup builds AI software for factory sales desks, and announced a $9.8 million seed round to close that gap.
Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun led the round, with angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel, and SoFi also taking part. Forgepoint will use the money to expand Frank, its AI inside sales representative, deepen its integrations with the systems manufacturers already use, and grow its team.
Frank reads incoming requests for quotation, the emails in which buyers ask a manufacturer for a price, along with attached part files. It flags missing specifications, applies the shop’s pricing rules, and drafts a quote for approval. Then it sends the quote and follows up with the customer.
“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, Forgepoint’s co-founder and chief executive.
From plant tours to a software coworker
Strauss spent his earlier career at Northrop Grumman, Bain & Company’s advanced manufacturing practice, and aerospace systems integrator Xwing, which Joby Aviation later acquired.
Alex Pareto, the co-founder and chief technology officer, led engineering for Brex’s Spend Management organisation. According to Forgepoint’s careers listing, Strauss holds an MBA from Stanford University, and Pareto previously founded Demeanor, a Y Combinator-backed startup that NTWRK later acquired.
In early 2025, the two spent months touring plants across the Midwest, shadowing employees to find where work stalled.
“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 Pareto.
How Frank turns RFQs into quotes
Forgepoint describes Frank as a new hire. It gets an email address on the manufacturer’s domain and learns the shop’s operating procedures, pricing rules, and approval requirements. When a request arrives, Frank asks the buyer about missing details, builds the price from the shop’s own cost model, surfaces similar past jobs, and routes the draft to the right reviewer. After approval, it produces the final document in the company’s template, sends it, and records the correspondence.
The set-up differs by shop. At a metal service centre, Frank matches material lists and cut lengths against the catalogue, applies customer-specific pricing, and checks inventory. At a foundry, it reviews part files, asks the buyer for missing drawing specifications, and prepares a first draft for an engineer.
Forgepoint says the same approach covers injection moulding, automation, fabrication, stamping, and machining. Engineers, estimators, and salespeople keep the technical and commercial decisions.
The work behind a reply is slow. A typical request lands as an email with several attachments and missing details. An estimator may need to call the customer, find similar jobs, build a cost model, get engineering approval, apply margins, enter the price into business software, send the quote, and manage follow-up. Forgepoint says those handoffs stretch the process from hours to days or weeks.
“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.
AI enters manufacturing
Forgepoint joins a growing group of AI startups targeting industrial workflows, though each focuses on a different one.
London’s CloudNC raised $20 million on September 9, led by Nimble Ventures, which took its total funding to $128 million. Its software helps machine shops program computer-controlled machines, and it plans to release Quote Agent, a tool for machining estimates, later in 2026.
Isembard, also in London, raised £37.5 million in Series A funding in March 2026, led by Union Square Ventures. It runs its own and franchised factories and uses software to handle quoting, among other tasks. Berlin’s Plato raised a $14.5 million seed round led by Atomico in February 2026 to automate sales, quoting, and business software workflows for wholesale distributors.
Forgepoint’s immediate test is narrow. A quote is a promise about price, and Frank hands every draft to a person for approval. The open question is how much of an estimator’s day it can remove before that approval step becomes the bottleneck, and whether early customer results hold up across foundries, service centres, and machine shops that each price work differently.
