Forgepoint Raises $9.8M From Primary and a16z Speedrun to Give Factories an AI Sales Team

America spent money on new factories at an annual rate of $171 billion in August 2026, according to US Census Bureau data, more than double the pace of 2021, yet many of the manufacturers meant to benefit from that boom can still make a part faster than they can send a quote for it. Forgepoint, a New York startup building AI coworkers for the manufacturing back office, has raised a $9.8 million seed round to close that gap. The round was led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun, with angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi also taking part.

Forgepoint's first product is Frank, an AI Inside Sales Rep that handles the request-for-quote to purchase-order process using each shop's own pricing rules and approval steps. The company reached seven-figure annual recurring revenue within six months of launching Frank, while hundreds of engineers, estimators and sales reps now use it every week. The new money will bring Frank to more manufacturers, deepen its integrations with the systems those companies already run and grow the team.

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A Manufacturing Market on the Rise

The reshoring of American industry is visible in the concrete being poured, as construction spending on manufacturing facilities held steady at roughly $75 billion a year between 2015 and 2021, then climbed to a peak of $237 billion in January 2025. In August 2026 it was still running at $171 billion, about 2.2 times its pre-boom level. Manufacturing accounted for 9.7% of US GDP in the second quarter of 2026.

New plants and new supply chains mean more requests for quotes reaching the machine shops, foundries, molders and fabricators that supply them. For those suppliers, winning that work depends less on how fast the shop floor can produce a part and more on how quickly the office can price it, check it and send a quote back to the buyer.

Where Factories Lose Time

Decades of investment have automated the shop floor, while the office around it still runs on email, spreadsheets and ageing enterprise systems. A typical request for quote arrives as an email with several attachments and missing specifications, while turning it into a quote can take ten separate steps. An estimator may have to contact the customer, find similar past jobs, build a cost model, get engineering approval, apply margins, enter the pricing into the ERP, produce the quote, update the CRM and then chase the buyer for an answer.

Only a few of those steps need expert judgment, since the rest are handoffs and data entry, which are what stretch a quote from hours into days or even weeks. Frank is built to take on those administrative steps, leaving engineers, estimators and salespeople to make the technical and commercial calls that decide whether a job is worth winning and at what price.

Speed Wins the Order

Those delays matter because buyers have stopped waiting, with nearly half of manufacturers expect a vendor to respond within 24 hours, according to a 2025 Gardner Intelligence study cited by Forgepoint, while the expectation has been rising among part buyers for years. A Paperless Parts survey found that 67% of part buyers expected a quote within 24 hours in 2020, up from 53% a year earlier.

A shop that needs a week to price a job is often no longer in the running by the time its quote arrives. Inside sales is therefore a natural place to start, because the speed at which a manufacturer can answer RFQs directly decides how much new business it wins.

The Founder Thesis

Forgepoint's chief executive, Jack Strauss, spent his career in industrials before founding the company, working at Northrop Grumman, in the Advanced Manufacturing practice at Bain & Company and at aerospace systems integrator Xwing. He kept running into the same disconnect, with manufacturers pouring money into automating production while everything before and after it still moved through inboxes and spreadsheets. Strauss argues that the manufacturers he met had strong demand and capable teams, but their best people were losing hours to administrative work. In a market where speed is a competitive advantage, Frank exists to keep jobs moving and leave skilled operators free for the decisions only they can make.

In early 2025, Strauss and co-founder Alex Pareto, previously head of engineering for the spend management organization at Brex, spent months touring plants across the Midwest, shadowing employees and studying how work actually moved through each business. Pareto, now chief technology officer, says the pair approached those visits as if they had been hired to do the job themselves, because they wanted to understand the problem in depth before trying to solve it. They came away convinced that the frontier AI being built in Silicon Valley could remove many of the bottlenecks they had seen on factory floors in the Midwest.

How Frank Works

Frank joins a manufacturer much like a new employee would, getting an email address on the company's domain and learning the shop's operating procedures, pricing rules and approval requirements. When an RFQ arrives, he reads the email and its attachments, flags missing requirements and contacts the buyer for clarification, then prepares a quote using the manufacturer's own cost model, surfaces similar historical jobs and routes the draft to the right reviewer. Once the quote is approved, he produces the final document in the company's template, sends it, manages the follow-up and records the correspondence.

Because quoting looks very different from one shop to the next, Forgepoint configures Frank around how each business already works. At a metal service center he matches material lists and cut lengths against the catalog, applies customer-specific pricing and checks inventory, while at a foundry he reviews part files, gathers missing drawing specifications from the buyer and prepares a first draft for an engineer. The same approach extends across injection molding, automation, fabrication, stamping and machining, while the company says it can go live with full integration in under 30 days.

Capturing Knowledge Before It Retires

Frank also solves a quieter problem, because as he works, he keeps the emails, attachments and reasoning behind every pricing decision, building a lasting memory of how each shop prices its work. That matters because US manufacturers could need 3.8 million new workers between 2024 and 2033, with as many as 1.9 million roles at risk of going unfilled, while a record 4.1 million Americans turned 65 in 2024.

In a business where 74% of manufacturers employ fewer than 20 people, the retirement of a single veteran estimator can take decades of pricing logic, customer preferences and exceptions with it. A system that records how those decisions were made gives smaller manufacturers a way to keep that knowledge and keep growing without hiring administrative staff at the same pace.

Early Results

Across its customers, Forgepoint says monthly quote throughput is up an average of 30% while time to quote has fallen by more than 55%, giving skilled operators more time back in their day. Chas Aday, founder and chief revenue officer of SIP Manufacturing, says his team was building quotes by hand and barely keeping up before Forgepoint, whereas now Frank drafts each quote and he can approve it in about two minutes, leaving him more time for customers and less for data entry.

The Investor Thesis

Zach Fredericks, principal at Primary Venture Partners, argues that a manufacturer's ability to grow depends on how much work its team can quote, plan and manage, adding that Forgepoint is giving those teams more capacity, starting with quoting. He says Primary backed Strauss and Pareto because they understand the details of that work and have a clear ambition to take the same approach across the entire manufacturing back office.

The round fits squarely within Primary's current strategy, since the New York firm raised a $625 million fifth fund in February 2026 to write seed checks averaging $5 million to $10 million, with vertical AI among its focus areas, while a16z speedrun invests up to $1 million in each company in its cohort. Angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi round out a cap table that pairs frontier AI and fintech operators with a founding team rooted in aerospace and industrial manufacturing.

What Comes Next

Forgepoint's mission is to put best-in-class technology into the hands of American manufacturers, starting with quoting because that is where a slow response most often costs a shop the job. Over time the company plans to apply the same approach to other back-office departments, helping manufacturers compete and grow without adding administrative headcount at the same rate. With factory construction still running at more than twice its pre-2022 pace and buyers expecting answers within a day, the shops that can quote fastest will be best placed to win the work that reshoring brings, which is where Forgepoint intends to make Frank the reason they can.

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