The latest company to enter the additive manufacturing market is Uptool, an AI manufacturing software startup “on a mission to accelerate U.S. manufacturing speed and productivity.”
The company says its first product is designed to help manufacturers quote 10 times faster and win more business. It secures $6 million in seed funding from industrial tech and vertical AI investors including Khosla Ventures, Eclipse, Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins,
Powered by hundreds of thousands of domestic SMB manufacturers.
Uptool’s solution goes beyond the AM industry to address challenges faced in the broader manufacturing industry.
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 difficult to build and implement software across a fragmented market.
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.
Uptool exists now to help SMB manufacturers transform their operations with speed and productivity.
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