Manufacturers were early enthusiasts for automation and digitalization: many have been using robotics on production lines for decades. But innovation in other areas of the business has been slower – one recent survey fund just 2% of manufacturers have embedded artificial intelligence (AI) widely across their operations.

Jack Strauss and Alex Pareto, the founders of New York-based start-up Forgepoint , believe this is a missed opportunity. The business, which is today announcing it has raised $9.8 million of seed finance, sees huge potential to use agentic AI to drive back-office efficiencies within manufacturing firms.

“Every manufacturing business has two halves: the production floor, where the actual products get made, and the office, where the job gets sold, quoted, procured, invoiced and generally managed via the sales-to-cash cycle,” says Strauss, Forgepoint’s CTO. “Over last 40 years, there’s been tremendous progress in production automation, but if you walk into the office, you find large teams of people who are spending most of their day doing things the same way they have always done them.”

Forgepoint’s goal is to close that disconnect, arguing that its technology can help manufacturers to save time and money, as well as to improve customer service. That’s becoming an even more critical imperative as manufacturers in the US – and elsewhere – face growing pressures from rising energy costs, higher interest rates and supply chain disruption caused by geopolitical tensions.

The start-up’s first initiative in this regard is “Frank”, an AI agent that works as an inside sales rep, helping manufacturers to move much more quickly from receiving an inquiry or sales lead to providing an accurate quote to compete for the business. “Frank’s task is support the inside sales team in managing a new opportunity until the business has won or lost that job,” explains Strauss.

That involves automating much of the process of matching the customers’ requirements to the business’s capabilities and capacity, assessing what will be required to deliver the job and estimating the cost of the materials and labour involved. A human engineer will check Frank’s work to make sure clients don’t receive wildly inaccurate quotes, Pareto explains, but the agent is able to work far more quickly. “The process of generating that quote compresses from something with many hand-off points and multiple people involved, and goes from taking days or weeks to a few hours,” he adds.

The company, only launched earlier this year, has already reached annual recurring revenues in excess of $1 million and claims the average customer has reduced its typical time-to-quote by more than 55%. So far, it’s processed more than $4 billion worth of requests for quotations.

That’s critical because research suggests speed of response makes all the difference to a manufacturers’ chances of winning the business. A study published last year by the market research group Gartner found nearly 50% of manufacturers’ customers expect a vendor response within 24 hours.

“Before Forgepoint, we were building quotes by hand and barely keeping up,” says one early adopter, Chas Aday, the founder and CRO of SIP Manufacturing. Pricing jobs, he points out, often requires manufacturers to assess complex requests with specifications that may be missing key data, before the company even begins to assess margin requirements, check capacity and generate the quote. “Now, Frank drafts and I can approve it in two minutes,” Aday adds. “I’m spending less time entering data and more time serving my customers.”

Such testimonials have prompted significant interest from investors. Today’s seed round is led by Primary Venture Partners and a16z speedrun, with angel investors from OpenAI, Brex, Vercel and SoFi also participating. “A manufacturer’s ability to grow depends on how much work its team can quote, plan and manage,” says Zach Fredericks, Principal at Primary Venture Partners. “Forgepoint is giving those teams more capacity, starting with quoting.”

The new funding will enable Forgepoint to build a sales team to put Frank in front of more manufacturers, as well as supporting product development. The company continues to develop its existing technology, and is also exploring the launch of other agents that could support manufacturers’ back-office work.