Episode #46: Industry Quoting 2.0: Harnessing AI for Fast Manufacturing Solutions, with Alex Huckstepp of Uptool
In this episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today, host Matt Horine welcomes Alex Huckstepp, Co-founder of Uptool, a manufacturing technology startup focused on solving quoting and sourcing bottlenecks through AI-driven solutions. Alex discusses his journey into the manufacturing industry and the founding of Uptool with his co-founder. They delve into the importance of speeding up the quoting process, the role of artificial intelligence in enhancing manufacturing workflows, and the broader impact of these advancements on the U.S. supply chain. Alex also highlights the company's mission to support small and medium-sized manufacturers and shares insights into the future of the industry.
Links
- Alex Huckstepp on LinkedIn
- Uptool
- Navigating Trump 2.0
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
- Veryable Shop
Timestamps
- 00:00 Introduction to US Manufacturing Today
- 00:15 Meet Alex Huckstepp: Founder of UP Tool
- 01:02 The Journey to Founding UP Tool
- 03:55 Challenges in Quoting and Supplier Discovery
- 08:31 UpTool's AI Quoting Solution
- 13:12 Future of Manufacturing and AI Integration
- 15:17 Reshoring and Supplier Visibility
- 17:19 The Role of Marketplaces in Manufacturing
- 20:03 AI's Impact on Small Manufacturers
- 22:34 Looking Ahead: Trends and Predictions
- 26:48 Conclusion and Where to Learn More
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] Welcome back to US Manufacturing Today, the podcast powered by Veryable where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers, shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of manufacturing, the changing landscape policies and more.
Today's guest is Alex Huckstepp, founder of Uptool, a manufacturing technology startup that recently emerged from stealth to tackle one of the industry's most persistent bottlenecks, quoting and sourcing. UP tool is building what it describes as an AI operating system for manufacturing. Designed to streamline how buyers and suppliers connect price work, and move faster from design to production.
At a time when reshoring tariffs, supply chain realignment are reshaping the industrial base. The ability to quote faster find the right suppliers and make decisions quickly is becoming a true strategic advantage. Alex joins us to talk about the future of manufacturing workflows, why speed matters more than ever, and how better tools can help rebuild a more responsive and resilient US supply chain.
Alex, welcome to US Manufacturing [00:01:00] today.
Alex Huckstepp: Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Horine: Alright, we're excited to have you on today and I'd like to start with your background and origin story for UP tool. So let's jump in right there. What led you into manufacturing and ultimately to founding UP tool?
Alex Huckstepp: I studied mechanical engineering and.
In college and was always very interested in the tangible, mechanical, physical sciences and wanted to really figure out career-wise how, how I could apply that in a way that was meaningful and interesting. Early in my career, 3D printing was really emerging as this kind of new, exciting technology, although it really had been around for a couple decades.
It was receiving its limelight, right from a media and attention standpoint. It sucked me in. I was hooked on this idea of digital fabrication and design freedom and the speed and the flexibility that it enabled. And so from a manufacturing perspective, I've, [00:02:00] I've worked for, helped build three different additive manufacturing companies, a couple robotic manufacturing companies, one in composites and one in sheet metal.
Then about two years ago I started working with my co-founder, Benny Bowler, who was the founder, CEO of Velo, 3D, where he spent the last decade building that advanced metal 3D printing company. And we both wanted to figure out how we could solve consistent, painful problems we had seen throughout the supply chain, specifically with small hin mix manufacturers, and we started with machine shops and fab shops.
We said, how can we leverage AI and pure software solutions to help these guys run faster and be more productive and more profitable, and serve the need for speed that we saw this next generation of hardware companies requiring. And there's [00:03:00] a whole wave of very disruptive companies from SpaceX to Tesla to and Orel and Joby.
These nuclear fusion companies now across the board that are really requiring our manufacturing supply chains to move a lot faster and they're demanding a lot more visibility and precision. And we said, this is an awesome time to figure out how we can leverage AI and software and build something that.
It's really impactful for these small but really critical manufacturers that make up a really big swath of the manufacturing base here in the US and build a company around this.
Matt Horine: No, that's a really important point that small, medium sized manufacturers make up something like 90% of the manufacturing base in the us.
98%. I always, I ballpark to 90, but yes, it's a pretty staggering amount and everybody thinks manufacturing just big plants and big facilities and all that, but it really is those shops. You also highlighted another interesting thing that is a recurring theme on this show about [00:04:00] quoting and supplier discovery.
And if you could give us a little insight, you felt like that was the right place to start.
Alex Huckstepp: Yeah. Benny and I spent a few months really just embedded with small high mix manufacturers like, like machine shops, really trying to understand how they operated, where the challenges were, where the opportunities were to help them run faster and more efficiently.
We kept coming back to this, this bottleneck where the, the typical machine shop is 10 people and the gm, the owner of that business usually was a machinist, started as a like one, two person machining company and scaled it a bit. And they're the ones that are interfacing primarily with the customer and doing all this quoting work and it, and we saw them just drowning in paperwork overall instead of email chaos.
Wrestling spreadsheets and downloading files, opening them up in three different programs. And we looked at that and we said, wow, we can leverage AI to really streamline that [00:05:00] process and automate a lot of the simple, repetitive parts of that process. Not all of it, but we're automating about 90% of the quoting workflow and a typical machine of FABshop.
And we said that's a really great starting point because when we talked with GMs and business owners. All, they almost all had this intuition that if they quoted faster, they would win more business. They knew how competitive it was and the speed that their customers demanded, but there were, there was always competing priorities, right?
They always had to make sure parts were getting shipped first, and so we said if we could help them 10 x the speed that they quote, they're gonna win more business and save time to focus on the real manufacturing work on the shop floor. It was just like really, really great entry point for us as like a, the first module, if you will, of a larger product for a map.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's a very interesting comment because a lot of times what we hear in manufacturing is that on, especially on the supplier side, we can't get somebody to answer the phone, but that seems like a typical. Refrain that we [00:06:00] hear very commonly, especially with machine shops 'cause they are busy, they're out on the shop floor, they're doing the actual work or finding the parts.
As people, a lot of people outside the industry don't realize how complex quoting can be the specs. What goes into that? Why is it still such a manual, slow and fragmented process? And how much business do you think is really lost based simply on the speed to quote process right now?
Alex Huckstepp: So quoting is surprisingly complex for precision manufacturers that are doing quick turn, high mix work because oftentimes only a third of these quotes turn into orders.
So you can't sp as a business owner, you can't spend too much time on any quote because it, it just simply, the math doesn't work. So to win enough business and achieve the right level of kind of like accuracy. In your estimates, it's a really difficult process and that, frankly, that's a large reason that you know that it's usually the owner in the GM that's still doing it.
A lot of them try [00:07:00] to bring in an estimator or push it down. To someone in their team, and then we see, usually it comes back to them because if you miss something, if you miscalculate something, if you're off, if you miss a tolerance on the drawing, if you didn't consider that extra process step that you needed to meet that requirement, if you were off on lead time, it could really damage the business.
You could lose potentially your whole month of profit or you could lose your key customer. It's a really difficult process and, and it requires that to be competitive in it. Everyone expects same day quotes today. Now, most people don't get same day quotes from US manufacturers, but, but they expect it.
And unfortunately they're, they're getting same day quotes from China and elsewhere. And so what that means is that oftentimes we've heard this from too many engineering teams and buyers at hardware companies, like they're just getting quotes much faster from overseas and they're having to, even though they wanna work with los local suppliers, they're having to place those orders.[00:08:00]
Because they need parts. And sadly, like some of them told us, look, we're getting parts from overseas faster than we're getting quotes from our local machine shop. So that was a huge motivation for me and Benny early on we're like, we gotta solve this problem.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's an incredible thing. And when things are moving in the real world that fast, so you can actually have a part delivered before you get an accurate or appropriate quote, that's a real problem set.
In this environment, I can imagine the margin erosion from poor visibility during the quoting process and not getting that accurate. It's a huge hangup. Let's talk now about your company. I know you guys emerged from stealth over the past week and saw the write-ups in Axios and a couple others, and for listeners hearing about UP tool for the first time.
How do you describe the platform and its purpose?
Alex Huckstepp: Yeah, so the mission of Uptool is quite simple. We want to accelerate US manufacturing and we wanna ensure that small high mix manufacturers, which are really the bedrock of our industrial base, can [00:09:00] compete and can do so profitably and at scale. With that, we launched just Wednesday with out of stealth.
Our first product, which is the AI quoting product that we were just discussing, and we have about 15 very happy, successful beta users that can, were in our beta and now our commercial customers. The first product, the quoting product, is really about getting from RFQ to quote as quickly as possible without sacrificing accuracy.
And AI affords us this really great ability to understand complex. Communications and documents and data like you couldn't before. Right. Unstructured data, so we're, we've heavily automated and integrated this first product so it can plug in very quickly and a machine shop can basically get an automated dashboard and start seeing in real time their RF Qs coming in and make sure they don't miss them and make sure they're prioritizing them and see the status update as they're estimating and sending [00:10:00] quotes.
They can go end to end within our application and they can view cad, they can view drawings. We are extracting all the key information. We're organizing the estimates for them. We're doing about 90% I say, of the sort of drafting of the estimate. But then they're applying their kind of critical expertise, domain knowledge, company knowledge about what lead times are really possible and what sort of markup makes sense for this customer.
And is this two ops or three ops? There's some very complex, nuanced things in there that we, we decided. We need the human in the loop, the machine, the GM wants to be in the loop. They don't wanna just blast out sort of auto quotes on most of their critical work. And so it also integrates with QuickBooks or other accounting systems.
So it really ties the whole process kind of end to end, but it makes it 10 times faster. Most of our customers now are doing quotes in about one minute per. And they told us before this, it was taking them 10 to 20 minutes per park.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that's a huge change and really great point on artificial intelligence in the real world that in practical terms, it just [00:11:00] compresses that beginning of the timeline and gets it into human hands very quickly to make a decision point.
So I can imagine most shop owners I've met, they certainly to be in the seat and see how that works out, but it sounds like it's a great tool for them. You've mentioned a couple things about the platform. Maybe some different stakeholders in there. How does it change the experience for buyers trying to find better suppliers and vice versa, try shops trying to win more work?
Alex Huckstepp: Yeah, so the first product, really the strategy was let's plug into existing ways of doing things, right? Let's meet the kind of customer, let's meet the supply chain where it is. 99% of this stuff happens over email. So we said, let's build a tool first. Let's build an application on the supplier side that just helps them plugs into their email and helps them just respond a lot faster.
Now, I can't talk too much about future roadmap. We are certainly gonna be working on a lot more software that helps small high mix manufacturers, like machine shops move faster end to [00:12:00] end, right from RFQ to building that kind of operating system out. But there's also some other exciting things that that can make an impact, we think, on a more ecosystem supply chain level.
We released one just free tool. If you go to up tool.com, you'll see it linked there under Find A Shop, and you can also go directly to usa machine shops.com and see that. And what that is, it's a map where we've mapped out list of 50,000 machine shops and fab shops and enriched it with a lot of data about their certifications, capabilities, size.
And we think it's the sort of only really complete free. Non-promotional. There's no ads on there. It's not pay to play. Anyone can just go right there and just find all these shops usually in their backyard that they had no idea about. And so we've we're building some free tools like that to, to help provide some value to find shops, but nothing formally productized yet.
Matt Horine: Uh, that makes a lot of sense. The ability to have any [00:13:00] kind of visibility, even locally sometimes can be a challenge. You'll drive by 20 machine shops on the way home, on the commute home, and. There's not like the big sign or anything like that. They're just doing the work, so that's a really great way to aggregate it.
Yeah. We talked a little bit about speed and I think manufacturing has always been rewarded on quality and reliability, which is the first step for if you're a consumer or a buyer, it's what's the reliability of the product and the quality and speed seems to be one that's catching up and expected from everyone these days.
Do you see quoting becoming a more strategic function rather than. An administrative one. How it is now, it seems like this is heading towards a more strategic direction within organizations, large and small, that this is the way to win more business, faster revenue, all of those things.
Alex Huckstepp: A hundred percent, yeah.
It, it has such a direct impact on the top line. We see it already in our data. The faster that you respond to an RFQ has a huge impact on your probability of winning that order, and there's even this sort of [00:14:00] flywheel that spins up. 'cause not only do you win more orders, you've signaled to that buyer that you can handle more rf Qs.
A lot of the times these engineers buyers are rationing out jobs to their limited number of shops that, that they've qualified or that they trust. And when you're getting back to them same day, sometimes same hour with quotes, guess what? You're gonna get more quote. You're gonna get more RQs. So it spins up this really interesting flywheel where it's win more orders, get more RF Qs, and so it's super strategic for a business that wants to grow, that's hungry to grow their sales, potentially to diversify their customer base if they're really dependent on a small set of a small set of shops.
Yeah, we think it's definitely a strategic imperative for small manufacturers to figure out how to be very responsive to their customers in general. But a big part of that is. Getting quotes back.
Matt Horine: Yeah, the constant need to delight the customer. It's not just a, Hey, check [00:15:00] the box, here's a quote I gave you if your heart's not fully in it.
But having the speed and accuracy with the reliability is a huge change maker, and I think that speaks to the overall environment right now. Kind of seeing this reindustrialization moment in America takes some shape, actually. Some real investments, some real work getting done. Reshoring, nearshoring are obviously hot topics and we talk a lot on the show about it.
How does quoting and supplier visibility fit into the bigger picture? When you look at supply chain disruption, and that can be anything from what we saw five, six years ago during the global upending to tariff policy to all of those things. It certainly has rechanged, the way that we look at the supplier base.
How does. The quoting component of that fit into the big picture?
Alex Huckstepp: Yeah. I think getting efficient and fast at quoting is really, is really critical for manufacturers that want to capture a lot of this reshoring initiative that's happening right now across a lot of OEMs There, it's also fairly noisy. [00:16:00] We see this already in, in the data with our customers in the sense that there's an uptick of quoting, but there's also an of rfq, but there's also an uptick of like kind of tire kickers.
Ah, I'm making this in India and I wanna bring it back. I know it's probably gonna be. Two, three times as expensive, but I need to explore whether it's viable. And I, and usually that's passed down some chain of command, right? Within big corporations. And so in order to, you don't know necessarily a lot of these times when you get new RF Qs, as a manufacturer, you don't know how serious the buyer is.
And it's very hard to, it's very hard to figure that out. And so sometimes you have to just decide, am I even gonna respond to this? And we see a lot of times, no, there's just things that are going, unre responded. Then if you are, you need to, and it is a very uncertain opportunity. You need to respond quickly, right?
You can't put too much, you can't invest too much time into things like that. But for the manufacturers that are, are able to field those kind of more uncertain, [00:17:00] more exploratory RF Qs that we see that are getting kicked up a lot by recent tariff changes, they're actually, there's actually an opportunity now to capture some very unique, valuable business from some pretty exciting new companies.
Two that are getting built, like you said, that are disrupting a lot of the, a lot of the major industries and supply chains here.
Matt Horine: Makes a lot of sense. And I think one thing you know to highlight about some of the overall change we've seen in manufacturing is. We could call like a marketplace shift or the use of marketplaces, a variable, obviously a marketplace.
And you guys as well, they've transformed industries like logistics, everything from hospitality to retail. Do you think manufacturing is finally reaching that moment? I'm sure you do as the founder of your company, but also there's sometimes there's a little bit of hesitancy for like digital adoption and bringing on new tools into the manufacturing space.
Do you see a little bit more general openness to bringing that into operations?
Alex Huckstepp: Yeah. And let me just, I guess correct you, we we're not a marketplace today. We're, yeah, this first product that we've released is very much a, is a solution for machine and fab [00:18:00] shops directly for those who pay attention to this space and keep track.
When you're talking about like custom hardware, custom parts, there've been some pretty interesting marketplaces that have emerged in the last decade or so, marketplaces or vertically integrated digital manufacturers. So you have companies like Xometry, which very much looks like a marketplace. I think has done a decent job of serving the needs of people that want sort of simple parts made quickly, that want to get an instant quote and order it and not think about it for a few days until it shows up.
I think that addresses a need of a certain type of buyer. And then you have companies that are doing quite well, send cuts, send, if people are familiar with them, like especially around sheet metal, they've made it very easy to take a model and go on there and get a quote and give 'em a credit card and usually get a part in a few days and.
If they're making that in-house. So I would say that's probably a better fit with a slightly more serious buyer, or maybe a buyer that cares more about IP and knowing who's seeing their data and [00:19:00] who they're doing business with. But I, we still feel like there's a massive segment of the market that, that, that needs to know who's making their parts, that wants to build relationships and certainly has a, a high preference for like local.
The proximity is important too, in terms of speed and ability to collaborate. That probably is unmet, probably is unmet today, where they're still lost in, in like the, the ages of like yellow page supplier lookups and emails that usually go unresponded. So yeah, it's definitely, it's, there's, to answer your question, like there's definitely more appetite.
There's definitely opportunity to connect the supply chain a lot more. There's still a lot of, we use the term like offline. A lot of suppliers in the US are still. Offline Undiscoverable.
Matt Horine: Yeah, no, that's a really big challenge. I think one that highlights the industry kind of being underserved by technology solutions for a long time.
Just something that they're local customers, local buyers, you like you said, [00:20:00] someone who, you know, down the street, their preferred vendors, all of those things. Turning now a little bit, because we, we mentioned it earlier on the artificial intelligence front, it gets a lot of attention, gets a lot of noise.
Right now it's seems like a good place to apply it. Would you, would you describe it as applying AI earlier in the process for design and automation? At this point, or why would you consider that more of the front end of the process?
Alex Huckstepp: So there's so many exciting opportunities for ai, cross design, simulation, manufacturing, logistics.
There's too many things to, for us to try to touch on. Now, but in, in terms of our, within our scope of helping small manufacturers leverage AI be on the right side of this technology shift, we think it's a really exciting time because when we look again at a typical machine shop, there's a significant amount of overhead and cost and drag on that business that is doing a lot of [00:21:00] bottlenecks that we think could really be addressed.
And of course, we started with quoting as one of those key bottlenecks. There's bottlenecks all across the place that that really, I think in some ways give small businesses even more advantage to apply ai. Like it can benefit them even more than maybe big companies, although certainly they don't have as much sophistication or like teams to go out there and find the right tools, right.
And figure out how to implement it. So yeah, we're hoping to be one of the, one of the companies that really builds the solutions, that helps small manufacturers apply this in a very. Meaningful way, but also the very like low risk high ROI way, so like our first product really has AI embedded at the core that's doing a lot of work to make these manufacturers faster, but it's, it plugs in like right away.
Like we're basically setting up new customers in less than an hour. And so there's almost immediate sort of time to value and zero kind of upfront investment in the way that we structure it. But yeah, back to the ai, like there's, it's an exciting time. It's a [00:22:00] scary time, I think for a lot of manufacturers.
The ones that are more excited or at least more open to figuring out how it can serve them and how they can leverage it are gonna be the ones that win in this big shift that we're experiencing right now.
Matt Horine: Yeah, no, I think it's an open embrace of it where a lot of people have chalked it up to a bit of a boogeyman, especially even on the labor front who talk about.
People, it's, it's not really displacing people in a lot of ways in their early innings. Here we're seeing it augment and help people do their jobs better, and that certainly applies to procurement and sourcing and quoting as well. So that's a really good recurring theme that we're hearing. Taking a step back and maybe for an outlook on 2026 and beyond, as you've come out of stealth and you begin to scale, what trends, other trends are you seeing adjacent that you're keeping your eye on and, and how you can help get ahead of the market outside of just macro conditions or anything to that effect?
Alex Huckstepp: What we're seeing with, with small high mix manufacturers here in the US is there's a few sort of key challenges and opportunities. [00:23:00] Energy material cost is high It, it is pretty high here compared to most other nations we compete with. Regulation and process has also been quite constraining, especially being here in California.
If you're a machine shop and you wanna put in a new paint line. To service some new customers program that's really, there's a lot of red tape, so there's challenges there. There's a lot of workforce challenges, which of course everyone's been talking about. Were really short in kind of the trades and and skilled, skilled labor that can.
Come in and help take over from all the, the skilled machinists and manufacturers that are retiring right now. And then the general opportunity for automation. And when I say automation, I don't mean just physical automation. I think there is a great opportunity for like robotics and pallet loading and automated inspections and things like that to help your typical machine shop.
But where we're focused is really the business automation. And to your point [00:24:00] earlier, like this isn't about, this isn't about displacing labor. It's really about amplifying what your current team can do and how fast they can do it. So if we think about like previous productive technologies that emerge, like Excel, right?
Of course there are some like jobs that shifted a bit around that, but overall it created a lot more jobs and a lot more productivity at the same time. I think AI is that opportunity in terms of trends. That's the biggest. That's the biggest thing. I think that's getting attention now and the biggest thing that can help solve some of those challenges that I mentioned before.
Matt Horine: No, that's a lot of the same sentiment that we're hearing across the sector right now and taking a look out into the future. If you could. Maybe just five years. 'cause the cycle is. A little bit shorter. No, no decade predictions or anything like that. But if you took a look out five years, what does the ideal manufacturing, sourcing, and quoting experience look like?
And how different is it from today?
Alex Huckstepp: We've seen [00:25:00] this kind of transformation take place in a lot of other industries. You look at something like restaurants and how that has changed, right? From how you used to pick a restaurant, make a reservation or a restaurant order from a restaurant, get visibility into where your thing is in the process.
If you order from a restaurant, how you can do all of that through one platform. I think there's a very interesting modernization organization that will take place that will have to take place throughout our supply chains. As we try to try to compete and try to re industrialize and reshore a lot of our critical industrial segments here, and I think it's really, I think it's really exciting on both sides for those that can, for on the buyer side, on the supplier side, for those that can adapt and that can, that can play a part in this new digital economy.
Things will move a lot faster, but they'll also be a lot more efficient. Businesses will have to adapt, but, but the whole, it's gonna apply lubrication [00:26:00] to the whole machine and yeah, it's pretty exciting to think that, that they're actually, like everyone talks about hardware needs to move more like software, this ecosystem.
Building an application today and AWS, and you have all these tools that you can integrate with and apply. I think some physical supply chains will have to start looking a lot more like the kind of software ecosystem, and everything's gonna get a lot more interoperable and visible and trackable. And the paperwork starts to go away or starts to become digital and Yeah, without beating a dead horse.
Like I think the biggest single change is, is like the speed and efficiency. It enables
Matt Horine: no spot on. I think the idea of faster and more efficient is the classic on time, under budget argument that everybody's looking for, and that's really great. Where can our listeners go to find out more about UP tool and the product and what you're working on?
Alex Huckstepp: Yeah, please. Check out our new website up tool.com. You can find us on LinkedIn and X and Instagram and Facebook [00:27:00] now if you search for up tool. And yeah, I really encourage you to go to the website. I think it's probably the best place you can go to to learn more about what we're doing and why we're doing it and if it's a fit for you, please reach out.
We'd love to chat.
Matt Horine: Excellent, great conversation Alex. And we really enjoyed having you on today.
Alex Huckstepp: Nice talking with you, Matt. Thanks a lot.
Matt Horine: Thank you again for joining us today and to learn more about UP Tool, please visit their website, which will link in the show comments. To stay ahead of the curve and to help plan your strategy, please check out our [00:26:00] website at www.veryableops.com and under the resources section titled Trump 2.0, where you can see the framework around upcoming policies and how it will impact you and your business. If you're on socials, give us a follow on LinkedIn, X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please feel free to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and leave us a rating and don't forget to subscribe. Thank you again for joining us and learning more about how you can make your way.