Arzana Raises $4.3 Million to Automate the Manufacturing Front Office

NEW YORK, September 2026 — Arzana, which builds AI agents that automate front-office work for American manufacturers, today announced it has raised a $4.3 million seed round led by Sunshine Lake VC, with participation from Fjor, Precursor Ventures, Founders Future, and Y Combinator. The company will use the funding to expand its AI and forward-deployed engineering teams, accelerate its go-to-market, and enter new manufacturing verticals as it works to keep pace with demand.

Arzana trains custom models on a factory’s historical data and deploys agents that automate quoting, order entry, invoicing, and other repetitive office work. The platform runs on top of a manufacturer’s existing ERP system, including Epicor, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, rather than replacing it. The company’s long-term goal is to fully automate 10,000 factories by 2035.

Arzana was founded in 2025 by William Alexander and Marshall Kools, two founders from the Midwest. Alexander, the company’s CEO, studied economics and computer science at Stanford University. Kools, its COO, holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford, the latter in industrial engineering.

“Demand for American-made goods is rising faster than the industrial workforce can grow. The way through that gap is to take repetitive office work off people's plates entirely, so the workforce we do have goes toward production instead of paperwork. We started Arzana to make that shift possible for every factory in the country.”

Arzana serves clients across the paper, plastics, packaging, mold and tool, and metallurgy sectors, including Milltown Paper and National Tool, among others. To date, the company has processed more than 100,000 purchase orders at 99.9% accuracy. Clients see an 80% reduction in order processing time, receive custom quotes in under three minutes, and have realized more than $1 million in time savings this year.

“Our clients measure us in cleared backlogs, not demos. Because every model is trained on a factory's own history, we deploy in weeks and hold 99.9% accuracy at scale. This round is about keeping up with demand and bringing the same system to new corners of American manufacturing.”

“The Arzana team has opened our eyes to the possible leveraging AI, breaking the paradigm of how our upfront operations have been conducted for years. Utilizing the tools they have implemented has dramatically increased our velocity for processing RFQ's and improved our accuracy exponentially. In addition, eliminating the clerical, mundane tasks freeing up resources for much more productive work!”