Manny Medina, previously best-known as the founder of sales automation startup Outreach ($4.4 billion valuation), has wowed investors with his young startup, Paid.
Paid just closed an oversubscribed $21.6 million seed round led by Lightspeed. With the €10 million pre-seed round it raised in March, London-based Paid has already raised $33.3 million and hasn’t even hit its Series A yet. A source familiar with the deal says the startup’s valuation is over $100 million.
Paid came out of stealth in March offering an interesting contribution to the AI agentic world: The company doesn’t offer agents. It offers a way for agent makers to charge their customers for these worker algorithms, based on the value their agents provide. This is a growing theme in AI, sometimes called “results-based billing.”
Paid promises to help agent makers “start charging for points of margin saved by their customers,” Medina describes.
It’s a new way of charging for software for the AI age. This is instead of the unlimited use, per-user fees of the SaaS era, or the unlimited use, buy-it-once-and-install-it fees of the client/server era.
Per-user fees don’t work because agent makers pay usage fees to the model providers as well as to cloud providers. Unlimited use could drive them into the red. (The vibe coding startup world tends to suffer from this issue.)
Agent providers instead “need to show the value the agent is delivering to your customers, because agents are running in the background for the most part,” Medina tells TechCrunch. If agents do work as advertised, then they’ll be assigned increasingly more, with their growing workloads going unnoticed.
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“If you’re a quiet agent, you don’t get paid,” Madina says. “You need an infrastructure that allows the agent to charge for the additional work that the agent is doing,”
But charging a monthly fee for a limited number of credits — following the model makers and vibe coders — is risky for agent-makers, too. That’s because companies don’t want to pay for AI slop, which is still what most AI produces. After billions spent on AI pilots, some 95% of enterprise projects were found to have no value, with only 5% put into production, according to a recent study from MIT.
Companies don’t want to pay agents to produce more emails that no one reads.
One of the startup’s early customers, for instance, is Artisan, the viral sales automation startup. (By the way, you can hear Artisan’s CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack speak on the topic at TechCrunch Disrupt next month.)
But Paid is also starting to see success with SaaS companies looking at agents for their next big growth. The startup just landed ERP vendor IFS as a new customer, it said.
Lightspeed’s Alexander Schmitt says the venture firm has invested “more than $2.5 billion into AI infrastructure and application layer companies over the last three years,” and has witnessed firsthand that most AI pilots fail.
“The core of that problem is that no one can really attach value to what agents are doing today,” Schmitt said.
Schmitt thinks that Paid is, so far, unique in its approach, saying “it’s something that we haven’t seen someone else build.” No doubt more competition for agentic results-based billing will come if it really does help agents enter the workforce en mass.
New investor FUSE and existing investor EQT Ventures also participated in the round.
Source: techcrunch.com
