One of President Donald Trump’s main priorities is to revive America’s manufacturing industry in order to reduce its reliance on foreign imports and create more jobs, and a startup called Forgepoint Inc. shares the same goal after raising $9.8 million in seed funding today.

The round was co-led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z Speedrun, the startup accelerator run by Andreessen Horowitz. Angel investors from companies including OpenAI Group PBC, Brex LLC., Vercel Inc. and Social Finance LLC also participated in the round.

Forgepoint is the creator of an artificial intelligence agent that acts as an “inside sales rep,” helping manufacturers to automate the entire request for quotation or RFQ process so that manufacturers can quickly win contracts and get to work for their customers. The agent, named Frank, taps into the manufacturer’s existing software systems and pricing structures in order to understand what the customer wants, and then come up with a suitable price quote.

Forgepoint co-founder and Chief Executive Jack Strauss (pictured) told SiliconANGLE that he’s trying to solve a glaring mismatch in modern industry, where the reality is that manufacturers can often create a very specific part faster than they can respond to their customer’s initial inquiry. He saw this personally while working for Northrop Grumman Corp, Bain & Co.’s Advanced Manufacturing practice and, later, at the autonomous aircraft manufacturer Xwing. At all three firms, he saw heavy investment in manufacturing automation, but a refusal to move on from their sluggish back-office systems that relied heavily on email, spreadsheets and aging business software.

Most manufacturers are far too slow to respond to their customer’s inquiries. Although some might consider it part and parcel of the process when ordering expensive, customized parts, they can still be punished if they move too slowly. By failing to provide a timely price quote, or at least respond to the customer’s initial message, they can easily put them off.

A 2025 study by Gardner Intelligence made that explicitly clear, finding that more than 50% of manufacturing firms expect a vendor to respond to an inquiry within 24 hours. Moreover, Forgepoint’s own research shows that 78% of companies end up buying from the first supplier that responds to their request.

Speed is of the essence, but slow RFQs continue to dog the manufacturing industry. Strauss wanted to understand why that is, so he and his co-founder Alex Pareto spent months touring various American Midwest manufacturing plants in early 2025, studying their business processes and shadowing employees. At the end of their tour, they concluded that artificial intelligence was the ideal tonic to the administrative issues that bog down the RFQ process.

That tonic is now available in the shape of Frank, an autonomous AI sales representative that’s designed to operate in the same way as a human in that position would. Like each person who joins a new company, Frank is given its own corporate email address and taught the specific operating procedures, pricing rules and approval requirements for each shop floor.

Armed with this knowledge, Frank can spring into action the moment an FRQ arrives. It works by analyzing the request, reading through the attached files, then calculates what the cost should be based on the company’s own cost models.

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

Frank goes further too. In many inquiries, customers tend to leave out specific important details, such as the exact specifications for a particular item that can impact the price. If Frank spots something like that, it will immediately send a follow-up email asking for clarification. If necessary, it can also send a highly technical request to human engineers for their input before coming up with the final quote.

This flexibility has enabled Frank to transform the bottom line of early adopters. Customers report an average increase in monthly quote throughput of 30%, while the average time it takes to actually come up with a quote has dropped by 55%.

Like many other AI startups that begin in one area and then expand their tentacles into related fields, Forgepoint has much bigger ambitions. With the funding from today’s round, it will not only strive to bring Frank to more shop floors, but also look at other ways AI can be used to scale up manufacturing operations.

Primary Venture Partners Principal Zach Fredericks said he’s backing Forgepoint because the ability to quote, plan and manage work is just as important as actual manufacturing capacity. “Forgepoint is giving those teams more capacity, starting with quoting,” he said. “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.”

Images: Forgepoint