Arzana

Arzana is an AI platform company rebuilding the front office of American manufacturing — automating order entry, quoting, RFQ processing, purchasing, AP/AR, and customer service for manufacturers who still run on fax machines and decade-old spreadsheets. Founded by Marshall Kools and William Alexander, two Stanford engineers and third-generation manufacturing families from Wisconsin and Iowa, the company was born from a deeply personal frustration: watching family businesses spend hours every day on manual data entry and slow quoting cycles. Arzana graduated from Y Combinator's P26 batch, raised a $4.3M seed round, and has grown 30% month over month — 10x-ing revenue during YC alone. Today, Arzana serves 22 customers ranging from 20-person shops to Fortune 500 manufacturers, and has processed over 100,000 purchase orders. The platform deploys semi-custom AI agents built primarily in Python, running on isolated AWS instances so no customer data leaves for outside providers, and already integrates with MES and computer vision systems. The team is seven people strong, headquartered in New York, and operates with a high-ownership, fast-moving culture where every engineer leads their own projects end-to-end — from client communication to deployment. The founders' long-term mission is to fully automate 10,000 factories by 2035, starting with order entry and quoting and expanding to full office and floor operations.