Manufact just put the “fact” back in manufacture, and this one did not roll off an assembly line. It was built in the open, commit by commit, repo by repo, until the market had no choice but to pay attention.
Manufact, formerly known as mcp-use, has secured $6.3M in seed funding led by Peak XV, with Liquid 2 Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, and Y Combinator in the round, plus an angel who happens to be the co-founder and COO of Supabase. That is not tourist capital. That is infrastructure money. The kind that shows up when the rails of a new ecosystem are being welded together in real time.
Congratulations to Luigi Pederzani and Pietro Zullo, co-founders who saw Model Context Protocol before it became cocktail chatter, and to Enrico Toniato, CTO, who is helping turn open source velocity into production-grade gravity. San Francisco based, with real operational roots in Zurich, this is not a slide deck company. It is code with a passport.
Here is what they actually built. An open-source SDK that became one of the most popular MCP libraries on the planet. Millions of downloads. Thousands of GitHub stars. Usage across more than 5,000 companies, including NASA, NVIDIA, and SAP. When 20% of the US 500 is quietly experimenting with your tooling, you are no longer a side project. You are plumbing.
MCP is becoming the universal adapter for AI agents, the protocol that lets large language models talk to tools, services, and data without duct tape. Manufact does for MCP what Vercel did for front end deployment. It takes you from GitHub repo to production MCP server and ChatGPT App without asking you to become a part-time infrastructure engineer. Hosting, scaling, auth patterns, edge deployments. The heavy lifting moves backstage so builders can stay in the spotlight.
The lesson for founders is simple and uncomfortable. Build where the standard is forming, not after it calcifies. mcp-use rode the open-source wave, earned developer trust the hard way, then evolved into Manufact when the market demanded reliability at scale. Community first. Cloud second. Revenue follows utility.
