Forgepoint raises $9.8M for AI quoting at manufacturers
Forgepoint raised a $9.8M seed for Frank, an AI quoting rep that drafts RFQ responses from a shop's cost model. Your pricing rules are the real product.
Forgepoint, a New York startup, has raised a $9.8 million seed round for AI quoting at manufacturers. Its product, Frank, reads requests for quotation, drafts the price from the shop's own cost model, and waits for a human to approve it. That last part is the whole story. The AI doesn't set the price. Your rules do. If those rules live in one estimator's head, no agent can help you yet.
What actually happened
Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun led the round, per Tech Funding News. Angels tied to OpenAI, Brex, Vercel, and SoFi joined. The founders are CEO Jack Strauss, ex-Bain advanced manufacturing, and CTO Alex Pareto, who led engineering for Brex's Spend Management organization.
Frank gets an email address on the manufacturer's domain. According to Unite.AI and the Forgepoint product page, it reads RFQ emails and attachments, pulls dimensions, materials, and tolerances from drawings, flags missing specs, and finds similar past jobs. It drafts the quote from the shop's pricing rules. A person approves it, and then Frank sends it and follows up with the buyer. Target shops include machining, stamping, fabrication, and injection molding.
The company says Frank reached seven-figure annual recurring revenue within six months of launch. It also claims customers average 30% more quotes a month and more than 55% less time to quote. Those numbers are company-reported. Nobody has audited them, and the sample size isn't public.
Why AI quoting matters for your business
Speed to quote wins jobs. In job shops and B2B services, the first credible quote often gets the work. If yours takes three days, an AI draft in an hour is a real edge.
The AI is the easy part. The cost model is the hard part. Frank prices "from the shop's cost model." That means machine rates, material costs, margins, and minimums written down as rules. If your pricing is "ask Dave," start there. Put it in a spreadsheet before you buy any tool.
Keep the approval line. Forgepoint routes every draft to a person. Copy that. Let the agent draft, check specs, and chase follow-ups. A human signs the number.
Key takeaways
- Forgepoint raised a $9.8M seed led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun
- Its agent, Frank, reads RFQs and drawings and drafts quotes from the shop's cost model
- A human approves every quote before Frank sends it
- Throughput and time-to-quote gains are company-reported, not audited
- Write down your pricing rules first; the agent is only as good as they are
Quotes stuck in someone's inbox? We turn your pricing rules into a quoting workflow that drafts from your data and keeps your team on the approve button. Estimate what faster quotes are worth, then tell us how you quote today.
Sources: Tech Funding News, Unite.AI, Forgepoint.
- #forgepoint
- #ai-quoting
- #manufacturing
- #rfq
- #funding
Tommy Rush — Founder, Rush Commerce
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