Forgepoint has raised $9.8M in seed funding to automate one of manufacturing’s least glamorous and most consequential tasks: quoting.
Primary Venture Partners and a16z Speedrun co-led the round, with angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi participating.
The problem is speed. A 2025 Gardner Intelligence study found more than half of manufacturing firms expect a vendor to respond to an inquiry within 24 hours, and Forgepoint’s own research indicates 78 per cent of companies buy from whoever responds first. A shop that can cut a specific part faster than it can price it loses the work anyway.
Forgepoint’s answer is Frank, an autonomous AI agent that behaves like a human inside sales representative. It gets a corporate email address and is taught the company’s operating procedures, pricing rules and cost models. When a request for quotation arrives, Frank reads the request and attachments, then calculates a price from the manufacturer’s own cost structure.
Co-founder and chief executive Jack Strauss and co-founder Alex Pareto spent months touring Midwest manufacturing plants in early 2025 shadowing employees before building the product.
The round is a bet that back-office quoting, not factory floor robotics, is where AI delivers near-term returns in American manufacturing.
