Forgepoint raises $9.8M to automate custom price quotes for manufacturing firms
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley
Forgepoint raised $9.8M to automate manufacturing price quotes with an AI agent. It’s built to speed up RFQs, where being first can win the work.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
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Forgepoint has raised $9.8 million to attack one of manufacturing’s least glamorous bottlenecks: the quote. The seed round was led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z Speedrun, with angels from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and Social Finance also joining in.
The startup’s pitch is blunt. Manufacturers can often make the part faster than they can answer the customer’s first email. Forgepoint says that delay costs real business, because a lot of buyers move on to whoever responds first. Its own research says 78% of companies buy from the first supplier to reply, and a 2025 Gardner Intelligence study found that more than half of manufacturing firms expect a response within 24 hours.
To fix that, Forgepoint built Frank, an AI agent that acts like an inside sales rep. It gets its own company email address, learns the shop’s operating procedures, pricing rules and approval steps, then reads incoming requests and attached files before generating a quote from the manufacturer’s own cost models. If a request is missing key details, Frank can chase the customer for clarification. If the question needs a human, it can escalate to engineers.
Co-founder and CEO Jack Strauss said the idea came from watching factories invest heavily in automation while leaving the back office stuck in email, spreadsheets and older software. He saw that pattern at Northrop Grumman, Bain’s Advanced Manufacturing practice and Xwing, and later spent months with Alex Pareto touring Midwest plants in early 2025. Their conclusion was that AI could clear the admin sludge around RFQs and let skilled people focus on the work only they can do.
Early users say the software is already moving the numbers. Forgepoint says monthly quote throughput is up 30% on average, while quote turnaround time is down 55%. The company plans to use the new funding to push Frank into more factories and broaden into other parts of manufacturing operations.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of AI use case that actually makes sense: boring, expensive, repetitive work where speed matters and nobody gets sentimental about the workflow. The market has spent too much time rewarding shiny demos and not enough time funding the software that stops good businesses from losing deals because someone was slow on email. AI that helps factories quote faster is useful; AI that writes poetry about factories can sit this one out.
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