Manufacturing never died. It just got buried under inboxes, spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and a quiet assumption that speed was optional. Walk into any small machine or fab shop in the U.S. and you feel it immediately. Steel humming. Talent everywhere. Time leaking out through the cracks. Quotes piling up like unread messages from opportunity itself.
That is the tension Uptool walked straight into when it came out of stealth on February 4, 2026 from San Mateo with a $6M Seed round. Led by Khosla Ventures, Eclipse, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins, this was not capital chasing a demo. This was conviction chasing a bottleneck. Because quoting is not paperwork. Quoting is the front door to revenue, and most shops are answering it way too slowly.
Uptool’s first product is an AI quoting platform built for the shops that actually make things. Small and midsize manufacturers. High mix. Real constraints. Real customers waiting. By automating roughly 90% of the RFQ to quote workflow, Uptool helps shops respond up to 10x faster. Not theoretically. Practically. The kind of speed where 2 minutes replaces 20 and momentum replaces hesitation.
Benny Buller, CEO, and Alex Huckstepp, Co-Founder, did not stumble into this problem. Between them sits almost 50 years inside manufacturing and technology, watching capable operators lose jobs not because they could not build, but because they could not reply fast enough. Uptool feels less like software and more like muscle memory, trained to read drawings, parse RFQs, handle materials and operations, and keep profitability intact while the shop keeps moving.
There is a quiet elegance to the name Uptool. In manufacturing it means preparing for the next job. In business it means refusing to stay idle while demand waits. This platform does both. It pulls RFQs straight from inboxes, organizes chaos, and turns responsiveness into a competitive weapon. When most orders go to the first credible quote, speed stops being a feature and starts being strategy.
The investors saw the same thing. 98% of U.S. manufacturing businesses are SMBs. Over 40% of the industrial workforce lives there. Fragmented capacity. Hidden throughput. Uptool is not trying to replace expertise. It is trying to surface it, amplify it, and make it visible at machine speed.
This round is not about hype or slogans. It is about reclaiming time for the shop floor, for customers, for growth. AI not as spectacle, but as leverage. Uptool did not launch to make noise. It launched to make manufacturers faster, sharper, and harder to ignore, and that kind of quiet acceleration tends to echo longer than any announcement ever could.
