Make the world's industrial expertise executable.
Every pump, valve, instrument and panel that runs a plant was selected by someone who knew what they were doing. That knowledge is the most valuable thing in industrial sales, and almost none of it is written down.
Applications Engineering is still manual.
Industrial distributors, manufacturers and reps win work by turning a customer's technical request into the right product, correctly configured and sized, priced and documented. In most companies that work sits with one or two people. At a larger distributor it's an Applications Engineer or a sales engineer. At a supply house or a small manufacturer there is no such title: it's the owner, the general manager, or the most senior tech, and the quotes get built after hours. Either way, everyone else waits on them.
The tools haven't helped much. ERPs store the parts. CPQ tools format the quote. Neither understands the application. So the same person still reads the RFQ, still searches the catalog, still remembers the last job, still builds the BOM and still chases the vendor. And because that person is usually also the one customers call, the quote queue competes with the customer conversation, and both lose.
The consequences are visible in every sales report: slow quotes, unquoted RFQs, margin leaking through stale costs, and growth capped by how many senior engineers you can hire in a labor market that isn't producing them.
The knowledge is the product.
You can't hire more senior engineers; the labor market isn't producing them. What you can do is give the people you have a system that does the routine applications-engineering work the way they would: understands the application, selects and configures the product, runs the calculations deterministically, validates its own work, and shows its evidence. Not a chatbot that drafts a paragraph. Not a form that fills itself in.
And it only earns trust if the company's own expertise runs through it: the catalogs and the manuals, but also the corrections, the customer standards, the substitutions, and the things the veteran knows that no catalog says. Every approved job should make the next one better.
That's what Axle is: an autonomous Applications Engineer that learns how your company does the work, does it, and hands your people the decisions that need them.
Mission: make the world's industrial expertise executable.
Built by people who've been on both sides of the RFQ.
Axle was started by Dan Oakes, a former Marathon Oil facilities and production field engineer. For eight years he was the customer: specifying equipment, sending RFQs to suppliers, and watching which vendors won. The ones who won were the partners who got an accurate, engineered quote back fast. He then spent five years building sales at early-stage software companies before founding Axle.
Axle is built with its customers, on their real RFQs, their real catalogs and their real templates. If you'd like to be one of them, book thirty minutes.
Put an autonomous Applications Engineer on every RFQ.
Process more opportunities. Respond faster. Give your experts their time back.