Manufact recently announced that they raised a $6.3M round after graduating from YC, where they were one of the fastest growing startups in their batch. But this investment took shape over many years. I've met Luigi long before Manufact existed, a couple of chapters earlier in his story.
What struck me immediately was the speed of his thinking, followed by an equally impressive speed of execution. He was deeply technical, but with a rare level of business and market acumen, and communication skills that are honestly uncommon in engineering-first founders.
He also dedicated some of his time to a give back project I had put together: translating and recording Italian podcast versions of Paul Graham’s essays.
I love people who give back, or give forward. It means they care. And care can bring you to great lengths, it’s an incredible propeller.
At the time though, I wasn’t fully convinced about what he was building. The wave he was riding wasn’t big enough yet. But I kept following him over the years, because I knew he would get to something meaningful.
And he sure did.
Last summer, Luigi, together with Pietro, got into Y Combinator, in the Summer 2025 batch.
He was finally building something immense, on top of a wave with incredible momentum.
I have a soft spot for YC companies ever since my time at Lombardstreet Ventures, where I met thousands of them. So I was positively biased even before our first call.
Also, for years and years there were basically zero Italian founders in the YC batch, so seeing Luigi and Pietro (and several others in that cohort) was genuinely exciting.
But YC also comes with a lot of baggage: high valuations, massive batches, meaningful dilution, and often not-so-hands-on support.
The debate around whether it’s still worth investing in YC companies has been on fire in recent years.
Then we had our first call with Luigi and Pietro.
And all the doubts disappeared.
Watching the way they interacted with each other, the clarity, the way their trains of thought were intertwining, it was just beautiful and inspiring.
I knew we had to be part of their journey.
The round was oversubscribed and competitive, but after some late night calls (for us, in Italy, while they were in SF), we proudly joined.
We met in Zurich on a very cold and wet day in November, and it was really special to finally have a coffee (and pastry!) together in person.
Why Now
Most people still talk about AI as a model race.
But the reality is: models are no longer the bottleneck.
Frontier systems are already capable enough to reason, plan, and call tools. The hard part now is turning that capability into something reliable in the real world.
The next decade of AI value won’t be created by standalone chat interfaces.
It will be created by agentic systems that operate inside software: interacting with internal services, enterprise workflows, permissions, and real operational constraints.
And that shift creates an infrastructure problem.
Once an LLM is expected to take action, you need:
a standard way to expose tools and services
a runtime to manage execution
authentication and access control
observability and debugging in production
a deployment layer that makes all of this shippable
This is exactly where Manufact sits.
They are building the missing infrastructure layer that makes MCP usable not just as a protocol, but as something developers can actually ship against.
Why We Invested
So why did we invest in Manufact?
1. Luigi and Pietro
Great companies start with great founders (and great humans!), and Luigi and Pietro are exceptional.
They combine:
vision, mission, technical skills
clarity of communication and thought
deeply complementary skill sets
an ability to attract talent: who wouldn’t want to build alongside them?
2. The Right Wave at the Right Time
We are at the point where agentic systems are moving from experimentation into production.
The question is no longer whether agents will exist.
The question is which platforms will become the rails they run on.
Manufact is building right at that layer.
3. A Very Large Market
The market here is not a niche developer tool.
It’s the infrastructure surface area created by AI agents proliferating across every company, workflow, and industry.
If agents become a core way software operates, the platforms that power their interaction with the real world will be enormous.
4. Best of Both Worlds
Manufact is being built across San Francisco and Zurich, and that combination matters.
Looking Ahead
The agentic era is creating entirely new infrastructure categories.
We believe Manufact is positioned to become a defining company in one of them.
Manufact is plugged into both worlds, and we see that as a real advantage.
SF gives proximity to the frontier ecosystem and early adopters.
Zurich brings extraordinary engineering density and one of the strongest technical networks in Europe.
Having Italian founders operating at that level of intensity is a reminder of how global this talent really is.
We’re proud to back Luigi, Pietro, and the Manufact team early, and we’re excited to be part of what they build next.
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