Forgepoint Raises $9.8M for AI Agent Quoting in Manufacturing

Forgepoint, a New York-based manufacturing software startup, announced on October 14 that it has raised $9.8 million in seed funding to scale an AI agent quoting platform built for machine shops and contract manufacturers. The round was co-led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun, with angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi also participating, according to Techflier.

The company's product, Frank, is an autonomous AI inside sales representative designed to sit inside a manufacturer's existing workflow. Frank is issued its own corporate email address, learns a shop's operating procedures, pricing rules and cost models, then takes on the quoting process end to end: reading incoming requests for quotation, analyzing attached part files, gathering missing requirements, preparing pricing from the shop's own cost structure, routing engineering questions to humans for review, and producing customer-ready quote documents with follow-ups. Reported by FinSMEs, the platform also surfaces historical jobs to keep pricing consistent across similar work.

Why AI agent quoting targets manufacturing's hidden bottleneck

The problem Forgepoint is attacking has little to do with the factory floor. American manufacturers can often machine a part faster than they can get a price quote back to the customer asking for it, according to the company's announcement carried by GlobeNewswire. Decades of automation reached production equipment, while the office around it still moves through email, spreadsheets and aging enterprise systems.

Speed matters because it decides who wins the work. A 2025 study by Gardner Intelligence found that more than half of manufacturing firms expect a vendor to respond to an inquiry within 24 hours, and Forgepoint's own research indicates that 78 percent of buyers end up purchasing from whichever supplier responds first. Shops that can cut a specific part faster than they can price it are losing contracts to slower machines with faster inboxes.

Chief executive Jack Strauss arrived at the idea through fieldwork. Before founding Forgepoint, Strauss spent his career in industrials at Northrop Grumman, Bain & Company's Advanced Manufacturing practice, and aerospace systems integrator Xwing, according to reporting by SiliconANGLE. In early 2025, Strauss and co-founder Alex Pareto spent months touring manufacturing plants across the American Midwest, shadowing estimators and quoting teams to understand why the request-for-quote process bogs down. Their conclusion: AI was the ideal fix for the administrative drag between a customer inquiry and a finished quote.

How Frank works alongside human estimators

Frank is positioned as a coworker rather than a replacement — the human-in-the-loop design that makes AI agent quoting trustworthy enough for real purchase orders. The AI agent handles the administrative work between engineers, estimators and salespeople — reading requests, calculating prices, drafting documents and following up — while humans keep technical and commercial decision making. When a request needs engineering judgment, Frank routes it for human review instead of guessing, according to the company's announcement.

The early traction numbers suggest manufacturers are hungry for exactly this division of labor. According to the GlobeNewswire release, Forgepoint reached seven-figure annual recurring revenue within six months of Frank's launch. Hundreds of engineers, estimators and sales reps now use the AI agent each week, and across customers, monthly quote throughput is up an average of 30 percent while time-to-quote has fallen by more than 55 percent. Strauss told SiliconANGLE that the company's founding insight for AI agent quoting came from watching strong teams waste their best people's hours on administrative work, and that the team built Frank to keep jobs moving while freeing skilled operators for decisions only they can make.

What the $9.8M means for the agentic AI trend

The funding arrives as investors shift attention from factory-floor robotics to back-office AI. The round positions Forgepoint as one of the first venture-backed bets on AI agent quoting as a standalone product category rather than a feature bolted onto existing software. Its thesis is that near-term returns in American manufacturing will come from automating paperwork, quoting and sales workflows — unglamorous tasks where an AI agent quoting platform can deliver measurable throughput gains within weeks of deployment. According to FinSMEs, the company plans to use the new capital to grow its team, deepen integrations with the systems manufacturers already use, and expand operations.

For AI agent quoting to scale, accuracy will be the deciding metric: a mispriced quote costs far more than a slow one. Forgepoint's answer is to keep humans in the approval loop and ground every price in the shop's own cost data, a design choice that mirrors how enterprises are deploying agents elsewhere in 2026.

If the throughput numbers hold at scale, AI agent quoting could reshape a corner of manufacturing that has resisted automation for decades. The next wave of manufacturing AI may not look like a robot arm at all — it may look like a faster inbox, an automated cost model, and a quote that lands before the competition has opened the email.