---
title: Forgepoint's AI Quoting Software Gives Manufacturers an Inside Sales Rep Called Frank
description: Forgepoint raised $9.8M led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun for Frank, AI quoting software that answers manufacturers' RFQs.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-10-14T13:29:14.689Z
updated: 2026-10-16T08:32:54.280Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/ai-quoting-software-forgepoint
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/ai-quoting-software-forgepoint-founders.webp
categories: Artificial Intelligence, Startups
content_type: Spotlight
region: New York City
publication: Sovereign Magazine
about:
  - type: Organization
    name: Forgepoint
    description: Forgepoint is a New York company that makes AI software for manufacturers' back offices, starting with quoting. Its AI inside sales rep, Frank, reads requests for quote, prepares pricing with each manufacturer's own cost model, routes drafts for human approval and sends and follows up on quotes. Forgepoint raised a $9.8 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun in October 2026.
    url: https://forgepoint.ai/
    foundingDate: 2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
    industry: Artificial Intelligence
---

Forgepoint, a New York startup whose AI assistant Frank prepares and sends quotes for manufacturers, has raised a $9.8 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's program for early-stage startups. Angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi also took part.

Forgepoint reached seven-figure annual recurring revenue within six months of launching Frank, and hundreds of engineers, estimators and sales reps now use it each week. Across its customers, monthly quote throughput is up an average of 30% and time-to-quote has fallen by more than 55%, the company says. The new money will bring Frank to more manufacturers, deepen its integrations with the systems they already use and grow the team.

## Manufacturing Quoting Software and the RFQ Process

American manufacturers can often make a part faster than they can get a quote back to the customer asking for it. [Decades of automation have reached the shop floor](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/how-ai-driven-manufacturing-is-bringing-production-back-to-america-lessons-from-gsk-s-30b-inv), but rarely the office around it, where quoting still runs through email, spreadsheets and aging enterprise systems.

> "Speed is a competitive advantage, so we built Frank to keep jobs moving and free skilled operators to focus on the decisions only they can make."
> — Jack Strauss, CEO and co-founder of Forgepoint

A typical request for quote (RFQ) arrives as an email with several attachments and missing specifications. To answer it, an estimator may need to contact the customer, find similar past jobs, build a cost model, get engineering approval, apply margins, enter the pricing into the ERP, generate the quote, update the CRM and then follow up. Expert judgment is needed for a few of those steps, and the handoffs and data entry around them stretch the process from hours into days or weeks. A 2025 Gardner Intelligence study of industrial buyers found that nearly half of manufacturers expect a vendor to respond within 24 hours.

Some Forgepoint customers took more than 30 days to send a quote before they used Frank, and others two to three days, Strauss says. The slowest step depends on the type of shop, but in every case most of the time between an RFQ arriving and the quote going back is spent waiting, while the request sits in an engineer's or estimator's inbox as they work on other jobs.

"We kept meeting manufacturers with strong demand and capable teams, but their best people were spending hours on administrative work," Strauss said.

## Frank, Forgepoint's AI Inside Sales Rep for Manufacturers

Frank joins a manufacturer much as a new employee would. It gets an email address at the company's domain, learns the shop's operating procedures, pricing rules and approval requirements, and starts on each RFQ as soon as it arrives, working on any number at once. It breaks the request down, checks whether the part can be made as designed, asks the customer for anything missing and builds a first bill of materials, then emails a colleague to review its work. After approval, it produces the final quote in the company's template, sends it, follows up with the customer and records the correspondence.

![From left, Forgepoint co-founders Jack Strauss and Alex Pareto on a plant floor](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/forgepoint-founders-plant.webp)
*Photo: Forgepoint*

A person must approve every price before Frank can produce a quote, and Strauss says that is the only fixed rule, because it keeps final pricing under human control before a customer sees it. Before that point, engineers, estimators and sales reps can step in at several stages or at none, and Forgepoint's engineers set Frank up around each customer's capabilities, costing model and quoting workflow.

At a metal service center, Frank matches material lists and cut lengths against the catalog, applies customer-specific pricing and checks inventory. Forgepoint also works with foundries and with manufacturers in injection molding, automation, fabrication, stamping and machining. Frank keeps the emails, attachments and reasoning behind every decision, which gives each shop a record of how it prices work as experienced estimators retire.

"Before Forgepoint, we were building quotes by hand and barely keeping up. Now, Frank drafts and I can approve it in two minutes," said Chas Aday, founder and CRO of SIP Manufacturing, a beverage contract manufacturer that is investing more than $100 million in a new plant in Southaven, Mississippi. "I'm spending less time entering data and more time serving my customers."

## The RFQ Process at a Foundry, Before and After Frank

At a foundry, an RFQ usually reaches a sales rep by email. The rep forwards it to inside sales or estimating, where someone opens the email and its attachments to work out what part needs casting, whether the foundry can make it and whether any information is missing. If something is missing, they email the customer and wait, which can take from several hours to several days. The request then goes to an applications or process engineer and to any other departments involved, such as machining or outside services, who each add the materials, operations and time the part needs. Those inputs add up to a cost, the estimator adds a margin to set the price, and the quote is typed up in a Word document or the ERP and emailed to the customer as a PDF.

With Frank, the sales rep forwards the same email to Frank's own address at the foundry. Within three to ten minutes, Frank has worked out whether the foundry can make the part and whether anything is missing, and it emails the customer directly for any missing specifications. Once it has them, it drafts a cost from the shop's past jobs and its own pricing model and emails an engineer to review it. When the engineer approves the cost and sets the margin, Frank fixes the price, produces the quote, emails it to the customer and records the details, documents and emails in its own CRM and in the foundry's ERP and CRM. Some customers have cut their time to quote by up to 91%, Forgepoint says.

## Jack Strauss and Alex Pareto, From Silicon Valley to the Midwest

Strauss spent his career in industrials before Forgepoint, at defense contractor Northrop Grumman, in Bain & Company's advanced manufacturing practice and at Xwing, an autonomous aviation company whose autonomy division Joby Aviation bought in 2024. In each job he saw manufacturers [spend heavily on automating production](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/pelico-ae-ventures-aerospace-orchestration) while the work before and after it still moved through email, spreadsheets and old enterprise software. His co-founder and CTO, Alex Pareto, previously co-founded Demeanor, a Y Combinator startup later bought by NTWRK, and then led engineering for Brex's spend management business.

In early 2025 the two spent months touring plants across the Midwest, shadowing employees and studying where work slowed down and why. "In those early days, we simply wanted to learn, as if we had been hired to do the job ourselves. We knew that before we could solve the problem, we needed to understand it deeply," Pareto said.

They started with inside sales because it is tied directly to revenue, since a shop's capacity to answer RFQs decides how much business it wins.

## Forgepoint's $9.8M Seed Round and Plans Beyond Quoting

Primary Venture Partners is a New York seed fund whose portfolio includes chip developer Etched. Forgepoint went through the [fifth cohort of a16z speedrun](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/space-a16z-speedrun-streaming-filesystem), which gives early startups up to $1 million in initial funding and a 12-week residency in San Francisco.

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

After quoting, Forgepoint plans to take the same approach to other back-office departments, so that manufacturers can grow without adding administrative staff at the same rate.

**About Forgepoint**

Forgepoint is a New York company that makes AI software for manufacturers' back offices, starting with quoting. Its AI inside sales rep, Frank, reads requests for quote, prepares pricing with each manufacturer's own cost model, routes drafts for human approval and sends and follows up on quotes. Forgepoint raised a $9.8 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun in October 2026.

[Website](https://forgepoint.ai/)

## FAQ

**Q: What is the best quoting software for manufacturers?**
It depends on the shop. Estimating and quoting tools for job shops help an estimator build and send quotes faster, while AI quoting software such as Forgepoint's Frank also handles the administrative steps around the quote: reading the RFQ email and part files, asking the buyer for missing details, pricing with the shop's own cost model, routing the draft for approval and following up after it is sent.

**Q: What is an RFQ in manufacturing?**
A request for quote (RFQ) is a buyer's request to a supplier for a price on a specific part or job, usually sent by email with drawings, part files and quantities attached. The supplier answers with a quote, and if the buyer accepts it, the buyer issues a purchase order (PO).

**Q: How long does it take a manufacturer to send a quote?**
It varies widely. Some of Forgepoint's customers took more than 30 days to send a quote before using Frank, and others two to three days. Most of that time is spent waiting while the request sits in an estimator's or engineer's inbox. Nearly half of manufacturers expect a vendor to respond within 24 hours, according to a 2025 Gardner Intelligence study, and Forgepoint says its customers have cut their time to quote by more than 55%.

**Q: Who invested in Forgepoint?**
Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun led the $9.8 million seed round, with angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi also taking part.