New York-based Forgepoint has raised $9.8 million in seed funding to expand Frank, an AI agent designed to automate sales and administrative workflows for manufacturers.
The round was led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun, with participation from angel investors associated with OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi.
Forgepoint was founded by Jack Strauss, previously at Northrop Grumman, Bain's advanced manufacturing practice and autonomous aviation company Xwing, and Alex Pareto, formerly an engineering leader at Brex.
The company is starting with a specific bottleneck: the request-for-quotation process.
Manufacturers frequently receive orders through emails containing technical drawings, specifications and incomplete pricing information. Employees must review the documents, estimate production costs, check capacity, calculate margins and coordinate approvals before returning a quote.
That process can take days, even when the factory itself could manufacture the part quickly.
Frank works within a manufacturer's existing email, pricing and business systems. It reads incoming requests, identifies missing information, applies the company's own cost model, prepares quotations and routes technical decisions to human reviewers. Once approved, it can send the quote and manage customer follow-up.
Forgepoint reports reaching seven-figure annual recurring revenue within six months of Frank's launch. The company says hundreds of engineers, estimators and sales representatives use the product weekly.
Across its customers, Forgepoint reports a 30% average increase in monthly quote throughput and a reduction of more than 55% in time-to-quote. These figures are company-reported rather than independently benchmarked results.
The funding will expand customer deployments and integrations, with longer-term plans to extend automation into other manufacturing back-office functions.
Forgepoint's entry point is commercially practical because faster quoting can directly affect revenue. Its larger ambition is to become an automation layer across manufacturing operations.
The challenge is standardization. Every manufacturer has different cost structures, customer requirements, legacy software and approval processes. Forgepoint will need to prove it can scale implementations without turning each deployment into a customized consulting project, while maintaining pricing accuracy and human control over consequential decisions.