VentureBeatMar 11, 04:01 PM
Manufact raises $6.3M as MCP becomes the ‘USB-C for AI’ powering ChatGPT and Claude apps
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.
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, which now manages more than $10 billion in assets. Liquid 2 Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, and Y Combinator also participated in the round, alongside angel investors including the co-founder and chief operating officer of Supabase.
The company’s thesis is deceptively simple and potentially enormous: 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.
“Software products are already being accessed by and will be accessed mainly by AI agents, or by users through chat interfaces,” Luigi Pederzani, co-founder and co-CEO of Manufact, said in an interview with VentureBeat. “That’s our bet. That’s our thesis. And that’s what we are really rooting our company on.”
How Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol became the universal standard for AI agents
To understand Manufact, you first have to understand the technology it is built on: the Model Context Protocol, or 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. MCP standardized this process 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.
The adoption has been explosive. In 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. More than 10,000 active public MCP servers now operate across the ecosystem. ChatGPT, Cursor, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Visual Studio Code all support the protocol. Enterprise-gra