Uptool Emerges From Stealth With $6M to Speed U.S. SMB Manufacturing via AI Quoting Platform

New updates have been reported about Uptool.

Uptool has exited stealth with a $6 million seed round led by top industrial and AI investors, including Khosla Ventures, Eclipse, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins, to address quoting bottlenecks for U.S. small and midsize manufacturers. The San Mateo–based startup is launching an AI-powered quoting platform designed to help high-mix machine and fabrication shops generate quotes up to 10 times faster, directly targeting a key constraint on capacity utilization and revenue growth.

The new software applies AI to ingest and structure emails, CAD files, engineering drawings, and BOMs, while providing configurable material and operations calculators and out-of-the-box dashboards for quote status, revisions, and customer communication. Implementable in about an hour with no upfront cost, the system aims to free owners and managers from manual quoting work, with early customers reporting both a tenfold reduction in quoting time and materially higher annual sales.

Uptool’s strategy centers on digitizing the long tail of U.S. SMB manufacturers, which account for roughly 98% of domestic manufacturing firms and over 40% of the industrial workforce but remain largely undigitized and operationally fragmented. By accelerating quoting and improving responsiveness, Uptool seeks to unlock underutilized production capacity, strengthen supply chain speed and transparency, and position SMB shops to capture more complex, time-sensitive hardware work.

Co-founders Benny Buller and Alex Huckstepp bring nearly five decades of combined experience from companies such as Velo3D, Applied Materials, and Carbon, grounding the product in firsthand knowledge of manufacturing bottlenecks, workforce constraints, and equipment underutilization. Backers characterize the company as a key enabler of U.S. reindustrialization, arguing that scalable AI tools for SMBs are essential to meeting growing global hardware demand and maintaining the country’s industrial edge.