SAN MATEO, Calif – Feb. 4, 2026 – Uptool, the AI manufacturing software startup on a mission to accelerate U.S. manufacturing speed and productivity, emerged from stealth today and announced its first product designed to eliminate a critical bottleneck for U.S. small and midsize (SMB) manufacturers, helping them quote 10 times faster and win more business. Backed by $6 million in seed funding from leading industrial tech and vertical AI investors including Khosla Ventures, Eclipse, Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins, Uptool is strengthening the U.S.’ industrial edge: its pace of innovation, powered by the hundreds of thousands domestic SMB manufacturers.

SMBs make up 98% of the manufacturing industry, and their ability to deliver high-quality parts at speed impacts the entire supply chain. The fast-paced, diverse operations within this sector of manufacturing have made it historically difficult to build and implement software across a fragmented market – leaving them behind the wave of digital transformation most other industries have already embraced. Today, the average shop only runs at a fraction of its production capacity, as owners drown in paperwork and manual processes.

"Frontier AI model breakthroughs have allowed us to reimagine how software can serve the hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturers left behind by modern enterprise software that is incompatible with their unique needs,” said Benny Buller, co-founder and CEO of Uptool. “We are building an AI platform to boost their business and bring their entire operations into the modern era. It’s been incredibly rewarding to see our initial customers rapidly grow their sales and free them from their desks so they can spend more time with their customers or on the shop floor manufacturing parts.”

Uptool is applying AI directly to the workflows that slow manufacturers down and bottleneck resources. Its new AI quoting software can be implemented in an hour with no upfront cost. Key features allow customers to cut time spent quoting down from hours to minutes, resulting in winning more business and increasing productivity:

• Out-of-the-box dashboards track quote status, revisions and customer communications.

• AI automatically extracts and organizes emails, computer-aided design (CAD), engineering drawings, and bill of materials (BOMs) across every one of a shop’s emails 

• Dozens of material and operations calculators provide accurate yet flexible estimates to capture unique workflows.

“I would spend hours a day quoting – time we don’t charge for,” said Nathan Dillon, general manager and owner of VelocityCNC. “Uptool has enabled me to cut my quoting time 10x in 2025, contributing to my biggest sales year to date – more than double the previous year.”

With almost 50 years of manufacturing and technology experience combined at companies like Velo3D, Applied Materials, and Carbon, Uptool’s founders Buller and Alex Huckstepp spent their careers working with manufacturers and experienced the issues that keep them from running at their full production capacity first-hand: lack of speed and responsiveness, bottlenecked resources, underutilized equipment, and a skilled workforce shortage. They founded Uptool to help a critical layer of the supply chain — SMB manufacturers — transform their operations with speed and productivity.

“Nearly 98% of U.S. manufacturing firms are SMBs — representing over 40% of the industrial workforce — but their capacity is fragmented and largely invisible,” said Charly Mwangi, partner at Eclipse. “Uptool digitizes this long tail of manufacturers, injecting speed and transparency into the supply chain. That’s the only way reindustrialization actually scales.”