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-grade deployment infrastructure exists from AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. An estimated 7 million downloads of MCP servers occur every 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. 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 stakes are high. The global AI agents market reached $7.84 billion in 2025 and is projected to surge to $52.62 billion by 2030, according to industry analysts. The MCP Dev Summit, the largest conference dedicated to the protocol, takes place April 2–3 in New York City under the Linux Foundation’s banner, with speakers from Docker, Workato, and major cloud providers — and Manufact will be among the companies presenting.

Two Italian founders, a Zurich co-working space, and an open-source library that went viral

Manufact’s origin story reads like a case study in the power of open-source communities to validate a startup idea before a single dollar of venture capital is raised.

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 startups that went through YC in previous batches. 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.”

They called the library mcp-use, with a slogan that resonated across the developer community: “Connect any MCP to any LLM in six lines of code.” The repository attracted 2,000 to 2,500 GitHub stars within weeks. Today, the SDK has surpassed 5 million downloads and 9,000 GitHub stars. Organizations including NASA, Nvidia, and SAP use the library, and Manufact claims that 20 percent 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. The pair applied to Y Combinator on the day of the deadline. “We were super spontaneous because we had this open-source vibe and just enjoyed the process. We had so much energy from the community that was lifting us up, and we knew it was going to be fine.”

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.

The company offers three core products. First, the open-source mcp-use SDK, available in both Python and TypeScript, lets developers spin up a fully functional AI agent connected to MCP tools in as few as six lines of code. It supports any large language model, including local models, and has integrations with LangChain and other popular frameworks. Second, a built-in inspector and testing suite allows developers to visually debug their MCP servers in a browser, view raw JSON-RPC traffic, and test tool execution in a sandbox — without connecting to a live AI agent. Third, the Manufact Cloud platform handles deployment, scaling, authentication, access control, and observability, allowing 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,” Zullo said. “We started Manufact because developers were spending too much time on plumbing instead of building and shipping their products.”

The company has also moved aggressively into MCP apps, a newer extension of the protocol that allows developers to render interactive user interface components — React widgets, data visualizations, input forms — directly inside chat clients like ChatGPT and Claude. Manufact’s SDK lets a developer scaffold an MCP app with a single terminal command, edit React widgets, and deploy to ChatGPT in under a minute. This positions the company at the center of a potentially massive new distribution channel: ChatGPT alone has more than 800 million users.

5 million downloads, zero revenue, and a crowded field of cloud giants

Every open-source company faces the same fundamental tension: the community that makes the project valuable is not the same thing as a paying customer base. Manufact has been candid about this challenge.

Pederzani said the company made a deliberate decision after Y Combinator to focus entirely on the open-source product and community, rather than rushing to monetize. “A lot of open-source projects jump immediately on the monetization part and kind of betray the community,” he said. While NASA, Nvidia, and other prominent organizations use the SDK, Pederzani acknowledged they are not paying customers. Manufact’s target is to reach $2 million to $3 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026, which would position it for a Series A fundraise.

The competitive landscape is crowding fast. AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, and Docker have all launched MCP hosting features. But Manufact’s founders argue they sit in a complementary position relative to the 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 said. “If that bet plays out, we will serve these systems. That’s going to be massive.”

Why software companies without MCP servers risk becoming “dumb databases” for AI agents

Behind Manufact’s optimism lies a darker observation about the software industry that gives their pitch urgency. Pederzani argued that companies that fail to make their products accessible to AI agents risk being reduced to “systems of record” — dumb databases that agents query but that no longer own the user experience or the 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,” Pederzani said. “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.”

In late February, Manufact co-hosted what it called the largest MCP apps hackathon to date at Y Combinator’s headquarters in San Francisco. The event drew 650 applications and 300 builders. OpenAI, Cloudflare, and Anthropic all sponsored it. Perhaps the most telling detail: eight employees from Anthropic attended — more people than Manufact’s own three-person team. The model providers, it appears, view Manufact as an ally rather than a threat.

Three employees, $6.3 million, and the ambition to capture a share of every AI tool call on Earth

For all its momentum, Manufact faces significant headwinds. The company has just three employees and has not yet demonstrated a scalable revenue model. Its most high-profile users are not paying customers. The $6.3 million seed round provides limited runway in an industry where infrastructure companies often require substantial capital to reach profitability. And the cloud providers that have launched MCP hosting features already own the customer relationships and billing infrastructure that enterprise buyers rely on.

But when asked what success looks like in two years, both founders pointed to a single metric: the percentage of global AI tool calls that flow through their infrastructure. “Our metric is the global tool calls or servers that run on Manufact — how many tool calls are passing through Manufact, made by agents,” Pederzani said. “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 billion — but it captures the scope of what Manufact’s founders believe is at stake. If MCP becomes the universal standard through which AI agents interact with all software, the company that provides the infrastructure for building and deploying MCP servers could occupy a position of outsized influence.

“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.”

NASA is preparing to conduct its first spacewalk at the International Space Station (ISS) in nearly a year, ending an unusually long break for the activity.

Truth be told, NASA had a spacewalk planned for early January but called it off after one of the two participating astronauts experienced a serious health issue that ultimately forced the early return to Earth of a SpaceX crew.

The space agency is currently targeting March 18 for a spacewalk involving NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Chris Williams.

Coincidentally, the spacewalk is scheduled for the 61st anniversary of the first-ever spacewalk. The milestone was achieved by Alexei Leonov, who exited his spacecraft for around 10 minutes during the Voskhod 2 mission in 1965. This was followed about three months later by the first-ever U.S. spacewalk, performed by NASA astronaut Ed White during the Gemini 4 mission.

Meir and Williams have been getting ready for their upcoming extravehicular activity by inspecting their spacesuits, trying them on, and checking the Quest airlock from where they will exit the space-based facility.

The pair will spend around six-and-a-half hours in the vacuum of space, installing a modification kit and route cables on the port side of the orbital outpost as part of preparations for a future roll-out solar array. The seventh roll-out solar array will be installed on a later spacewalk to augment the main solar arrays’ power generation capabilities, NASA said.

This will be the fourth spacewalk for Meir, who participated in her first one in 2019, followed by two more several months later. Meir arrived at the space station last month as part of SpaceX’s Crew-12.

Williams, on the other hand, is on his first space mission and so the upcoming spacewalk will mark his debut outside the station. The American astronaut arrived at the ISS before Meir, in November 2025, aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Last year IEEE launched its first virtual career fair to help strengthen the engineering workforce and connect top talent with industry professionals. The event, which was held in the United States, attracted thousands of students and professionals. They learned about more than 500 job opportunities in high-demand fields including artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and power and energy. They also gained access to career resources.

Hosted byIEEE Industry Engagement, the event marked a milestone in the organization’s expanding workforce development efforts to bridge the gap between academic training and industry needs while bolstering the technical talent pipeline, says Jessica Bian, 2025 chair of the IEEE Industry Engagement Committee. The IEC works to strengthen the connection with industry professionals, companies, and technology sectors through global career fairs, as well as its Industry Newsletter, AI-powered career guidance tools, and World Technology Summits, where industry leaders discuss solutions to societal challenges.

“We are bringing together companies, universities, and young professionals to help meet the demand for technical talent in critical sectors,” Bian says. “It is part of our commitment to preparing the next generation of innovators.”

The virtual career fairs are expanding to more IEEE regions this year. One was held last month for Region 9 (Latin America). One is scheduled next month for Region 8 (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) and another in May for Region 7 (Canada).

A global career fair is slated for June.

Registration information for all the fairs is available at careerfair.ieee.org.

Innovative recruitment events

The fairs, which use the vFairs virtual platform, provide interactive sessions with representatives from hiring companies, direct chats with recruiters, video interviews, and access to downloadable job resources. The features help remove geographic barriers and increase visibility for employers and job seekers.

The career fair platform features interactive engagement tools including networking roundtables, a live activity feed, a leaderboard, and a virtual photobooth to encourage participants to remain active throughout the day.

Bringing together thousands of professionals

STEM students participated in the U.S. and Latin America events, along with early-career professionals and seasoned engineers—almost 8,000 participants in all. They represented diverse fields including software engineering, AI, semiconductors, and power systems.

Siemens, Burns & McDonnell, and Morgan Stanley were among the dozens of companies that participated in the U.S. event. More than 500 internships, co-op opportunities, and full-time positions were promoted.

“I found the overall process highly efficient and the platform intuitive—which made for a great sourcing experience,” said a recruiter from Burns & McDonnell, a design and construction firm. “I was able to join a session, short-list several high-potential candidates, review their résumés, and initiate contact with a couple of them.

“I am optimistic that we will be able to extend at least one offer from this pipeline.”

Participating students described the fair as impactful.

“I gained valuable hiring insights from industry leaders, like Siemens, TRC Companies, and Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories,” said Michael Dugan, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student at Rice University, in Houston.

New tools elevating the candidate experience

Attendees had access to AI-guided job-matching tools and career development programs and resources.

Prior to the fair, registrants could use the IEEE Career Guidance Counselor, an AI-powered career advisor. The ICGC tool analyzes candidates’ skills and experience to suggest aligned roles and provides tailored professional development plans.

The ICGC also makes personalized recommendations for mentors, job opportunities, training resources, and career pathways.

Pre-event workshops and mock interview sessions helped participants refine their résumé, strengthen interview strategies, and manage expectations. They also provided tips on how to engage with recruiters.

“I gained valuable hiring insights from industry leaders, like Siemens, TRC Companies, and Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories.” —Michael Dugan, graduate student at Rice University, in Houston

During the Future Ready Engineers: Essential Skills and Networking Strategies to Stand Out at a Career Fair workshop, Shaibu Ibrahim, a senior electrical engineer and member of IEEE Young Professionals, shared networking strategies for career fairs and industry events as well as tips on preparation, engagement, and effective follow-up.

“The workshop offered advice that shaped my approach to the fair,” Dugan said. “It truly helped manage expectations and maximize my preparation.”

Learning more about IEEE

To help participants learn about IEEE and its volunteering opportunities, its societies and councils set up roundtables and technical community booths at the fairs. They were hosted by IEEE Technical Activities, IEEE Future Networks, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

“While exploring volunteer opportunities, I was excited to learn about IEEE Future Networks,” Dugan said. “Connecting with dedicated IEEE members, like Craig Polk, was a definite highlight.” Polk is an IEEE senior member and a senior program manager for IEEE Future Networks.

A commitment to career development

IEEE created the career fairs as free, accessible platforms for employers and job seekers to serve as a trusted bridge between companies seeking top technical talent and members dedicated to advancing their career. It is our responsibility to support them by connecting them with meaningful career opportunities.

In today’s unpredictable job landscape, IEEE is stepping up to help our talented members navigate change, build resilience, and connect with future employers.

Google Play has introduced a new feature called Game Trials, which will let you play a portion of paid games for free before you commit to buying them. It’s now rolling out to select paid games on mobile, and it’s coming soon to Google Play Games on PC. Titles that offer Game Trials will show a button marked “Try” on their profile pages. When you click it, you’ll see how long you can play the game before you have to buy it. In Google’s example, the survival and horror game Dredge will give you 60 minutes of free play time, after which you’ll get the option to either buy the game or delete it from your device.

Google has also announced that it’s releasing more paid indie games over the coming months, including Moonlight Peaks, Sledding Game and Low-Budget Repairs. It has launched a new section in the Play store, as well, to feature games optimized for Windows PCs. You can wishlist the games from that section to get a notification when they’re on sale.

Finally, the company is rolling out Play Games Sidekick, the Gemini-powered Android overlay it announced last year, to select games downloaded from Play. Sidekick can show you relevant info and tools for whatever game you’re playing without having to do a search query. But if you’d rather ask other people for gaming advice instead of an AI, you can also look at a game’s Community Posts, a feature now available in English for select titles on their Play pages.

The services will be rolled out under a new brand, Flexar

Singapore car-sharing company BlueSG is preparing to roll out a new service under a new brand, Flexar.

In comments to CNA, BlueSG confirmed that Flexar is currently in the “beta phase” of its shared car mobility service. It is slated to launch later this year.

The move comes around seven months after the company ceased its operations on Aug 8, 2025 and let go of staff.

The new brand will have the same operating concept, which allows users to pick up a car from a station near them and drop it off at another location in Singapore.

Flexar is recruiting early testers

In response to The Straits Times, a BlueSG spokesperson shared that the team behind Flexar is currently focused on “testing and refining a range of exciting new offerings designed to enable flexible urban mobility.”

The new service will introduce a revamped platform, a refreshed fleet featuring a different mix of vehicles, and an expanded network of pick-up and drop-off points. It is also expected to deliver “greater reliability and a smoother user experience.”

However, the spokesperson declined to share further details, such as pricing or the total number of pick-up and drop-off points, until the official launch.

Between Jan and Mar 2026, BlueSG has also been hiring for several roles, including automotive technicians, an operations manager, and customer service agents, across various job portals.

On Mar 9, the company reached out to its community to recruit early testers ahead of the official launch. The invitation, shared in a BlueSG Telegram user group, asked interested participants to complete a questionnaire. Shortlisted users will be able to try the revamped service and provide feedback.

Flexar has also launched a website, with more details listed as “coming soon.”

“Access reliable cars when you need them, where you need them. No ownership hassles, no long-term commitments, just seamless A-to-B journeys across Singapore,” the company wrote on its homepage.

BlueSG ceased operations & laid off staff in Aug 2025

Back in Aug 2025, BlueSG announced a “pause” to its services and retrenched the majority of its employees shortly after.

At the time, the company said it planned to return with an “upgraded” service powered by “advanced technology, deep expertise, and enhanced operational capabilities.”

The overhaul was driven by the company’s observations of changes in Singapore’s car-sharing landscape and the opportunity to scale its user base.

Since the pause, BlueSG’s fleet of around 190 electric Opel Corsa‑e hatchbacks has been sold to car dealers or listed on used-car marketplace Sgcarmart.

Meanwhile, about 790 units of the purpose-built Blue Car were scrapped after the Land Transport Authority did not permit the vehicles to be transferred for uses outside the electric car-rental trial scheme. The vehicles were initially expected to be sold to Tribecar, another car-sharing operator in Singapore.

BlueSG’s pause also had ripple effects across the industry. French energy giant TotalEnergies, which previously served as BlueSG’s main charging infrastructure provider, exited Singapore’s EV charging market. By the end of 2025, it had transferred its network of more than 1,400 public charging points to other operators.

BlueSG was first launched in 2017 under the EV car-sharing programme by the Land Transport Authority. It was initially a subsidiary of the French Bolloré Group, but in 2021, the service was acquired by Singapore-based Goldbell Group.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here. 

Featured Image Credit: Wirestock Creators via Shutterstock.com/ Flexar