Manufact raises $6.3M as MCP becomes the ‘USB-C for AI’ powering ChatGPT and Claude apps

Source: VentureBeat

Source: VentureBeat

The Rise of AI‑First Software

For decades, software companies designed their products for a single type of customer: a human being staring at a screen. Every button, menu, and dashboard existed to translate a person’s intention into a machine’s action.

But a small startup based in San Francisco and Zurich believes that era is ending — and that the future belongs to companies that build software not for people, but for the artificial‑intelligence agents that increasingly act on their behalf.

Funding Round

Manufact, a three‑person company that emerged from Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch, announced in February that it raised $6.3 million in seed funding led by Peak XV (the venture‑capital firm formerly known as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, now managing > $10 billion in assets).

Other participants included:

• Liquid 2 Ventures
• Ritual Capital
• Pioneer Fund
• Y Combinator
• Angel investors, among them the co‑founder and COO of Supabase

Company Thesis

The company’s thesis is deceptively simple and potentially enormous:

“Software products are already being accessed by and will be accessed mainly by AI agents, or by users through chat interfaces,” said Luigi Pederzani, co‑founder and co‑CEO of Manufact, in an interview with VentureBeat.
“That’s our bet. That’s our thesis. And that’s what we are really rooting our company on.”

As AI agents take over more of the work that humans perform inside software applications—filing expense reports, managing customer‑support tickets, writing code, booking travel—every software product on earth will need a new kind of interface designed specifically for those agents. Manufact is building the open‑source tools and cloud infrastructure to make that transition possible.

How Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) Became the Universal Standard

What Is MCP?

To understand Manufact, you first have to understand the technology it is built on: the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 that has rapidly become the dominant way for AI agents to communicate with external software tools and data sources.

• Before MCP: Connecting an AI agent to a company’s software required custom integration work for every single tool—a bespoke connector for Slack, another for Salesforce, another for a database. It was tedious, expensive, and fragile.
• After MCP: The process is standardized into a single protocol, functioning as what CIO Magazine recently called “the USB‑C of AI”—a universal connector that lets any AI model plug into any software system through a single, consistent interface.

Adoption Highlights

• December 2025 – Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation’s new Agentic AI Foundation, co‑founded with Block and OpenAI, with support from Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare.
• > 10,000 active public MCP servers now operate across the ecosystem.
• Major products supporting MCP: ChatGPT, Cursor, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Visual Studio Code.
• Enterprise‑grade deployment infrastructure is available from AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
• An estimated 7 million MCP‑server downloads occur each month.

“Great protocols are as good as their adoption,” Pederzani said, drawing a comparison to the mobile revolution. “We saw the same transition with mobile, right? In the beginning, companies were just creating a pretty simple mobile app… What we think is that software products will be MCP first, or chat first.”

Market Opportunity

• Global AI agents market: $7.84 billion in 2025 → projected $52.62 billion by 2030 (industry analysts).
• MCP Dev Summit – the largest conference dedicated to the protocol – will take place April 2–3 in New York City under the Linux Foundation’s banner, featuring speakers from Docker, Workato, and major cloud providers. Manufact will be among the presenting companies.

Founders’ Story

Two Italian Founders, a Zurich Co‑working Space, and an Open‑source Library That Went Viral

Pietro Zullo and Luigi Pederzani, both originally from Italy, met at a co‑working space in Zurich—the same space that produced Browser Use, Bloom, and other YC alumni.

• Zullo was studying at ETH Zurich.
• Pederzani was working at Morgen, an ETH spin‑off AI startup used by teams at Spotify, GitHub, and Linear, after leading a 12‑engineer team at Accenture Switzerland.

Both were winding down previous projects in early 2025 when MCP launched.

“We both wrote agents in the past, and it was such a mess to write the tools, the integrations,” Zullo recalled. “When MCP came out, it looked like the perfect fit for what we were trying to do. But only Cursor, Claude Code, a few closed‑source applications allowed you to actually use the protocol. I don’t think I’m going to do groceries or browse the internet or check my emails from Cursor—it’s like, not the right code, right? So we wrote an open‑source library to basically do what you could do in Cursor with MCP servers, but on your own machine, on your own application, in your own terms.”

The mcp‑use Library

• Name: mcp-use
• Slogan: “Connect any MCP to any LLM in six lines of code.”
• Initial traction: 2,000–2,500 GitHub stars within weeks.
• Current stats: > 5 million downloads and 9,000 GitHub stars.
• Adoption: Organizations including NASA, Nvidia, and SAP use the library; Manufact claims that 20 % of the US 500 have experimented with it.

“The amount of power that you can put in six lines of code was really staggering,” Zullo said.

YC Application

The pair applied to Y Combinator on the deadline day, acting on a spontaneous decision to join the accelerator.

Inside Manufact’s Plan to Become the “Vercel for MCP” — From SDK to Cloud in 60 Seconds

Manufact’s strategy borrows directly from the playbook that turned Vercel into a multi‑billion‑dollar company by providing hosting and developer tools for front‑end web applications. The analogy is deliberate: just as Vercel made it trivially easy to deploy a Next.js app, Manufact wants to make it trivially easy to build, test, and deploy the MCP servers and MCP apps that AI agents need to interact with software.

Core Products

Manufact offers three core products:

1. mcp‑use SDK (open‑source)

   • Available in Python and TypeScript.
   • Lets developers spin up a fully functional AI agent connected to MCP tools in as few as six lines of code.
   • Supports any large language model (including local models) and integrates with LangChain and other popular frameworks.

2. Built‑in Inspector & Testing Suite

   • Visually debug MCP servers in a browser.
   • View raw JSON‑RPC traffic.
   • Test tool execution in a sandbox without connecting to a live AI agent.

3. Manufact Cloud Platform

   • Handles deployment, scaling, authentication, access control, and observability.
   • Enables teams to go from a GitHub push to a production MCP server in under 60 seconds.

“As software becomes more agentic, the hard part isn’t the model anymore — it’s everything around it,” says Zullo.
“We started Manufact because developers were spending too much time on plumbing instead of building and shipping their products.”

MCP Apps: Extending the Protocol

Manufact has moved aggressively into MCP apps, a newer extension of the protocol that lets developers render interactive UI components—React widgets, data visualizations, input forms—directly inside chat clients like ChatGPT and Claude.

• The SDK can scaffold an MCP app with a single terminal command.
• Developers can edit React widgets and deploy to ChatGPT in under a minute.
• This positions Manufact at the center of a massive distribution channel: ChatGPT alone has > 800 million users.

Open‑Source vs. Revenue

“A lot of open‑source projects jump immediately on the monetization part and kind of betray the community,” says Pederzani.

• 5 million downloads, zero revenue so far.
• NASA, Nvidia, and other prominent organizations use the SDK, but they are not paying customers.
• Target: $2 M–$3 M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by the end of 2026, positioning the company for a Series A raise.

Competitive Landscape

• AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, and Docker have all launched MCP‑hosting features.
• Manufact’s founders argue they occupy a complementary position relative to model providers:

“Anthropic and OpenAI are betting that their own chat products — Claude and ChatGPT — will become the primary interfaces through which people access all software,” Pederzani notes.
“If that bet plays out, we will serve these systems. That’s going to be massive.”

Why Companies Without MCP Servers Risk Becoming “Dumb Databases”

Pederzani warns that firms that fail to make their products accessible to AI agents may be reduced to systems of record—databases that agents query but that no longer own the user experience or customer relationship.

“Now we have customers that come to us and say that their customers are choosing to adopt their product over a competitor because they offer an MCP server,” he says.
“At the same time, there is a threat here that could put companies to become just systems of records. And this is really something that a lot of companies are scared of.”

Recent Milestones

• Largest MCP apps hackathon (late February) – co‑hosted at Y Combinator’s headquarters in San Francisco
  • 650 applications, 300 builders
  • Sponsored by OpenAI, Cloudflare, Anthropic
  • Eight Anthropic employees attended — more than Manufact’s own three‑person team

The model providers appear to view Manufact as an ally rather than a threat.

Headwinds & Ambitions

• Team size: 3 employees.
• Revenue model: Not yet proven; most high‑profile users are non‑paying.
• Runway: $6.3 M seed round provides limited capital in a capital‑intensive infrastructure space.
• Competition: Cloud providers already own the customer relationships and billing infrastructure that enterprise buyers rely on.

Success Metric

When asked what success looks like in two years, both founders pointed to a single metric:

“Our metric is the global tool calls or servers that run on Manufact — how many tool calls are passing through Manufact, made by agents,” says Pederzani.
“Like Stripe is doing for the global GDP. We’re going to win if we can get a great number for it.”

The Stripe analogy is ambitious—Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually and is valued at roughly $90 B—but it captures the scope of what Manufact hopes to achieve: capturing a share of every AI tool call on Earth.

“In the end, what matters is to make something agents want,” Zullo said, riffing on Y Combinator’s famous dictum to “make something people want.” “What we’re focusing on and what we’re building is to help this transition of building for agents instead of building for humans.”