Manufact, a three-person startup from San Francisco and Zurich, has raised $6.3 million in seed funding to build open-source infrastructure for a world where AI agents — not humans — are the primary users of software.
The round was led by Peak XV, the venture capital firm formerly known as Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, which manages more than $10 billion in assets. Liquid 2 Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, and Y Combinator also participated, alongside angel investors including the co-founder and COO of Supabase. The company emerged from Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch.
The company’s bet centers on the Model Context Protocol, or MCP — an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 that has become the dominant method for AI agents to communicate with external software tools and data sources. Before MCP, connecting an AI agent to third-party software required custom integration work for every tool. The protocol standardized that process into a single, consistent interface, prompting one industry publication to call it “the USB-C of AI.”
Adoption Has Moved Fast
In December 2025, Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation’s new Agentic AI Foundation, co-founded with Block and OpenAI, with backing from Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare. More than 10,000 active public MCP servers now operate across the ecosystem, with an estimated 7 million downloads of MCP servers occurring every month.
ChatGPT, Cursor, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code all support the protocol. Enterprise deployment infrastructure is available through AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
“Great protocols are as good as their adoption,” said Luigi Pederzani, co-founder and co-CEO of Manufact. “We saw the same transition with mobile. Who would have bought a hotel or a flight or used a bank account from a mobile app? But as time passed, the web became mobile first. What we think is that software products will be MCP first, or chat first.”
The Market Manufact Is Chasing
The global AI agents market reached $7.84 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $52.62 billion by 2030, according to industry analysts. Manufact‘s thesis is that every software product will eventually need an interface built specifically for AI agents performing tasks humans once handled directly — filing expenses, managing support tickets, booking travel, writing code.
“Software products are already being accessed by and will be accessed mainly by AI agents, or by users through chat interfaces,” Pederzani said. “That’s our bet. That’s our thesis. And that’s what we are really rooting our company on.”
The MCP Dev Summit, billed as the largest conference dedicated to the protocol, is scheduled for April 2–3 in New York City under the Linux Foundation’s banner, with speakers from Docker, Workato, and major cloud providers. Manufact is listed among the presenting companies.
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