Forgepoint Raises $9.8M Seed for Manufacturing Quotes

The margin on a manufacturing job starts taking shape before the first machine runs. Forgepoint is building AI software for the people who decide what a shop should charge, bringing the customer request, the shop's cost model and the approval process into the same workflow.

The New York startup announced a $9.8M seed round on October 14, 2026, led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun. Co-founders Jack Strauss, CEO, and Alex Pareto, CTO, are starting with Frank, an AI inside sales representative that prepares quotes while manufacturers retain technical and commercial approval.

That division of work puts the financing inside a practical industrial question: how much additional business can a capable factory consider with the people already working in its office? Forgepoint's opportunity sits in the work needed to answer a buyer, where a drawing, a missing specification and a pricing exception can each require someone else's attention.

What Forgepoint's seed round will fund

Forgepoint says the capital will support adoption by more manufacturers, deeper integrations with their existing systems and team expansion. Angel investors associated with OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi also participated. The announcement identifies those employers as affiliations of the angels; it does not establish corporate investments by the four companies.

The backing brings together Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun. Primary's Zach Fredericks, whose current firm profile identifies him as Principal, Industrials, describes the company's opportunity in terms of the work manufacturing teams can quote, plan and manage. That is a useful way to read the investment: the amount of work a factory can pursue also depends on its commercial office.

The announcement does not disclose a valuation or a detailed financing history. The $9.8M figure belongs to the seed round, without an inferred cumulative funding total. Forgepoint's broader ambition includes other manufacturing back-office departments, while Frank gives that plan a concrete starting point in inside sales.

Selling into an existing shop also gives the integration budget a clear job. Pricing rules and customer relationships already reside in systems and working habits. Forgepoint has to bring useful work into that environment, carrying those details along as another manufacturer starts using Frank.

From an incoming drawing to an approved quote

Forgepoint's product documentation describes an agent that reads emails and attached PDFs, spreadsheets and CAD files, extracts the information needed for a quote, and contacts the customer about missing details. Frank prepares a bill of materials and pricing against the manufacturer's own model, including labor, materials, margins and minimums. A human reviews and approves the quote before it goes out.

After approval, Frank can deliver the document, manage follow-up and maintain the record of the exchange. The manufacturer's reviewer still has a consequential job: deciding whether the proposed commitment makes sense. Moving routine preparation ahead of that decision gives the reviewer a different starting position, with more of the material already assembled.

For a buyer, the useful result is a response that belongs to the supplier being asked to do the work. A price assembled without that shop's operating rules would create another review assignment. Forgepoint is selling the ability to carry those rules through a series of administrative steps, with the decision owner still present.

The approach also explains why quoting is a revealing starting market for industrial AI. A request crosses sales, technical knowledge and business records before it becomes an order. Software handling that passage encounters both the information a business has stored and the judgments its people continue to make.

The founders learned the job before building the workflow

Jack Strauss worked at Northrop Grumman, Bain & Company's Advanced Manufacturing practice and Xwing before Forgepoint. Alex Pareto previously led engineering for Brex's Spend Management organization. Forgepoint's current employer listing confirms their CEO and CTO roles and describes an in-person New York City team.

The pair spent months visiting Midwest plants in early 2025, observing employees and studying how the work moved. Their combination of industrial experience and software delivery matters because a quote carries a business's particular way of accepting risk. The next factory can require a different implementation even when its inbox looks familiar.

That puts manufacturing knowledge inside product development. An estimator may recognize why a past job needed extra review, while a sales representative remembers a customer's preferences. Bringing those details into repeatable work can reduce the need to find the same person every time a related request arrives.

Forgepoint's homepage presents the preservation of historical quotes, drawings and decisions as part of Frank's role. For an owner, that creates a reason to consider the product beyond the immediate response time. The business needs its accumulated experience to remain usable as new requests and new employees arrive.

Early adoption and the work the capital must support

Forgepoint reports reaching seven-figure annual recurring revenue within 6 months of Frank's launch. Its funding announcement also reports hundreds of weekly users, an average 30% increase in monthly quote throughput and a reduction of more than 55% in time-to-quote. These are company-reported figures; the announcement does not publish a cohort breakdown or measurement methodology.

The current homepage uses a separate, higher turnaround improvement claim. This article keeps the announcement's measurements together rather than treating figures with unspecified populations as interchangeable. Quote throughput is also distinct from production output or booked revenue, because a prepared quote still needs a buyer to accept it and a shop to deliver the work.

Industrial buyers will encounter another set of questions around access and confidential commercial information. Forgepoint's security page describes its controls and SOC 2 Type II claim. Those are vendor representations here; the underlying audit report was not reviewed for this article. A prospective customer can use the documentation to begin its own assessment of how pricing records and customer information would be handled.

Related DevCuration reporting on CADDi's manufacturing decision platform and Rapta's manufacturing intelligence places Forgepoint in a wider industrial software conversation. The products address different operating tasks; Forgepoint's stated entry point is the commercial passage from a buyer's request to an approved quote.

The $9.8M financing brings more resources to the deployment work around Frank. As Forgepoint enters more shops, its team will keep encountering the choices that make one manufacturer's quote different from another's: which costs belong in the price, who can approve an exception and how much of the reasoning the next employee can recover when a familiar buyer sends a new drawing.