Manufact Raises $6.3 Million In Seed Funding

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Manufact (formerly mcp-use), a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company, raised $6.3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Peak XV, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator, and notable angels including the co-founder and COO of Supabase.

The $6.3 million seed round provides capital to scale infrastructure and expand the team amid growing demand for production ready MCP tools. This funding follows the company’s participation in Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch and reflects confidence in the expanding ecosystem around agentic AI.

Founded in 2025 by Pietro Zullo and Luigi Pederzani, with Enrico Toniato (former IBM Research AI lead) as CTO, Manufact offers the mcp-use SDK and mcp-use Cloud. These tools allow developers to quickly build, deploy, and manage MCP servers and interactive apps that work inside platforms like ChatGPT and Claude.

MCP, introduced by Anthropic and widely adopted across the industry, standardizes how AI models interact with external systems. Manufact positions itself as the essential infrastructure layer, reducing the complexity of custom integrations so teams can focus on building valuable AI applications rather than plumbing.

Manufact announced a $6.3 million seed funding round, marking a significant milestone for the young San Francisco company that rebranded from mcp-use to Manufact. This round, led by Peak XV with strong participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator, and a group of strategic angel investors, including the co-founder and chief operating officer of Supabase, underscores the market’s enthusiasm for specialized infrastructure supporting the next wave of AI agents.

The company, founded in 2025 by Pietro Zullo and Luigi Pederzani and later joined by CTO Enrico Toniato (a former IBM Research tech lead with expertise in AI reasoning), emerged from Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch. Its core offering centers on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard originally launched by Anthropic in 2024 and now broadly supported across major AI providers including OpenAI and Google. MCP functions as a universal interface, often compared to USB-C for AI, enabling large language models and agents to securely and reliably connect to external data sources, tools, services, databases, and workflows without bespoke integrations for each new system.

Manufact delivers practical tools that make MCP accessible and production ready. The open source mcp-use SDK, available in Python and TypeScript, allows developers to create MCP agents, servers, and interactive applications with minimal code, often just a handful of lines. These MCP Apps can render rich, interactive UI components directly within chat interfaces like ChatGPT and Claude. For production environments, mcp-use Cloud provides a managed hosting platform with features such as observability, authentication, configuration management, scaling, and a built-in Inspector tool for debugging and real time monitoring of JSON-RPC traffic. Additional capabilities include GitHub App integration for automated deployments on code pushes and support for persistent memory and state in agents.

Traction has been rapid and impressive for a company less than a year old. The mcp-use SDK has surpassed 5 million downloads, with recent figures indicating continued acceleration from 3 million in Q4 2025. It has earned over 9,000 GitHub stars and is used by more than 4,000 companies, reportedly including 20% of the US 500 (Fortune 500 equivalent). Notable adopters include NASA, which employs it to develop an internal agent called “MADI,” as well as teams at NVIDIA, SAP, and various enterprises and regulated organizations building internal tools, incident management agents, and workflow automations. Broader ecosystem metrics highlight MCP’s momentum, with reports of approximately 7 million monthly downloads of MCP servers industry wide, positioning it as the de facto standard for agent tool communication.

The funding will primarily support infrastructure expansion and team growth to address rising enterprise demand. Co-founders have highlighted the shift in AI development challenges: while models themselves have become powerful, the surrounding “plumbing” (integrations, deployment, security, scaling, and management) remains a major bottleneck. Pietro Zullo noted, “As software becomes more agentic, the hard part isn’t the model anymore, it’s everything around it. We started Manufact because developers were spending too much time on plumbing instead of building and shipping their products.” Luigi Pederzani echoed the pain points of pre-MCP AI embedding efforts and emphasized the need for robust infrastructure to fully realize MCP’s potential. The company aims to become the default framework and infrastructure layer for MCP development, handling operational heavy lifting so builders can focus on high value applications ranging from internal enterprise agents to customer facing apps in consumer AI interfaces.

Funding History

Key Performance Metrics

Investor Syndicate:
The syndicate combines top-tier institutional support with domain expertise. Peak XV’s leadership signals strong conviction in AI infrastructure plays with global scalability potential. Y Combinator’s continued involvement reflects the company’s strong performance since the S25 batch. Angels from successful developer tools companies (e.g., Supabase) bring operational insights into open source, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise adoption. This mix supports both technical excellence and go to market execution as Manufact targets broader enterprise and regulated sector penetration.

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In the broader market, the rise of agentic AI has shifted focus from isolated large language models to interconnected systems capable of autonomous action across tools and data. MCP addresses fragmentation by providing a standardized, secure protocol that major players have embraced, reducing vendor lock-in and accelerating innovation. Manufact’s positioning as the open source first, production oriented layer fills a critical gap: while many organizations experiment with agents in sandboxes, scaling them reliably into real workflows requires precisely the deployment, management, observability, and integration capabilities the company is building.

The fresh capital positions Manufact to enhance its cloud platform, deepen enterprise features (such as advanced access controls, compliance tooling, and multi server orchestration), expand integrations, and grow its team to support increasing demand. The company has already demonstrated product market fit through rapid organic adoption and high profile use cases. With MCP solidifying as foundational infrastructure, much like how container orchestration or API standards became ubiquitous, Manufact has a compelling opportunity to capture significant value in the developer tools and AI operations space. Challenges remain around maintaining open source momentum while monetizing cloud services, navigating security requirements in regulated industries, and competing with larger platforms that may build competing capabilities. However, the combination of strong early metrics, elite backing, and alignment with a clear industry need suggests a promising trajectory for Manufact as a key enabler in the agentic AI era.

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