Instalily: faster industrial RFQs still need governed commercial authority

External-source research synthesis, not an OfferSignal client result. Based on the retained October 2026 research and source-specific dates.

An industrial distributor can receive an RFQ as an email, PDF, fax, web form or spreadsheet, then spend time finding the right product, price tier, stock position and delivery date across several systems. The difficult work is not merely answering in natural language. It is turning incomplete commercial information into a traceable draft without allowing an agent to approve a wrong part, price or commitment.

What Instalily is built to do

Instalily combines InstaBrain, a company-specific memory and small-language-model layer, with InstaWorkers that operate across enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), inboxes and internal applications. Lily is presented as an “AI Forward Deployed Engineer”: it maps systems, people and permissions, then builds or maintains connectors, logic and workflows around a business outcome. 1 3

The clearest workflow is industrial distribution and maintenance, repair and operations (MRO). An incoming request can be interpreted, product identities and alternatives resolved, and price lists, contract tiers, quantity breaks, margin rules, branch inventory and lead times checked before a quote is assembled in the ERP. Instalily references P21 and SAP, but the retained sources do not document every connector or supported ERP version. Engineered or project quotes, safety-critical parts, unclear authority, credit questions, below-floor pricing and conflicting rules remain human exceptions. Lily may prepare the evidence; a person retains decision and send control. 2

What the reported cases establish

Modern Distribution Management reports SRS Distribution moving from exploratory work in late 2022 or early 2023 through a small pilot to full implementation, with agents embedded across sales. The reported scale reached 1,000 representatives across 760 branches, with expansion planned beyond outside sales. This is customer implementation evidence, not a controlled revenue or return-on-investment result: no before-and-after denominator or causal calculation is published. 7

The vendor’s MRO case describes an unnamed national industrial-automation distributor. In month one, agents reportedly answered more than 6,000 emails and returned roughly 1,500 quotes. Within two months, the company counted more than 10,000 hours per year and about six inside-sales-representative equivalents of capacity returned. A complete $142,731 quote was reportedly priced and margin-checked in about three minutes. These are provider-reported figures without error or conversion denominators, and returned capacity is not proof of headcount reduction. 2

A Google/Instalily case study reports field-service training falling from 120 days to just over a month, manager review of multi-hour appointments falling to 10 minutes, safety and standard-operating-procedure adherence rising from 50% to 90%, logistics handling falling from 15 minutes to three, and industrial quote turnaround moving from five to six days to minutes, alongside an approximately 10% revenue uplift. The page names no customers and gives no sample, period, pilot-versus-production status or revenue denominator. Treat these as illustrative deployment outcomes, not benchmarks. 8

Evolution and funding are context

Founded in 2023, Instalily’s public positioning moved from domain-trained InstaWorkers for sales, service and operations in 2025 toward Lily as a cross-system engineer in 2026. InstaWorkers became available through Google Cloud Marketplace in October 2025, with Gemini teacher models, Gemma student models, private enterprise memory and cloud-native deployment described by the company. 5 9

The $60 million Series B is corroborated as closing or being announced on 14 July 2026, led by Energize Capital with Insight Partners, Home Depot Ventures and United Rentals. Public reporting says total funding reached nearly $100 million. The reviewed sources do not itemise the financing between the disclosed $25 million Series A and that total, so the amounts should not simply be added. Funding is context, not product or safety validation. 4 10

An illustrative distributor pilot

For an illustrative distributor, start with one website-RFQ inbox rather than unattended quoting. Preserve canonical part identifiers, revisions, units, currencies, current price and inventory timestamps, lead-time feeds, customer authority and approval thresholds. Keep drawings, material and tolerance requirements, equipment, capacity and project evidence separate from model interpretation. A commercial owner should approve the final offer, especially when work is custom, safety-critical or binding.

Shadow the workflow first. Measure response time, exact product and quantity accuracy, margin exceptions, stale-price errors, duplicate actions, human-touch rate, backlog, rework and quote-to-order conversion. Log every source, tool action, permission and reviewer correction. Test malicious retrieval, wrong branch, conflicting revisions, revoked authority and retries. Public pricing is undisclosed; terms indicate order forms or statements of work, possible excess-capacity fees and customer responsibility for security and connected equipment. 6

The practical conclusion is narrow: Instalily appears suited to governed cross-system RFQ, sales-support and field-service execution, with independent evidence of SRS adoption and mostly vendor- or partner-reported outcomes. It is not evidence for unattended approval of engineered custom quotes. The first commercial gate is data readiness and explicit authority, not agent fluency.

Sources and next reading

• InstaLILY homepage: public overview and enterprise contact-led access.
• Lily product page: product and roadmap description; no public sandbox.
• Industrial distribution/MRO workflow: public workflow and case metrics; no self-serve execution.
• Google Cloud Marketplace announcement: marketplace availability announcement.
• Google AI Studio case study: partner case study, not a customer application or source repository.

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References