Paid, The ai Agent ‘results-based Billing’ startup from Manny Medina, raises huge $21m Seed

Manny Medina, antecedently best-known arsenic nan laminitis of income automation startup Outreach ($4.4 cardinal valuation), has wowed investors pinch his young startup, Paid.

Paid conscionable closed an oversubscribed $21.6 cardinal seed information led by Lightspeed. With nan €10 cardinal pre-seed information it raised successful March, London-based Paid has already raised $33.3 cardinal and hasn’t moreover deed its Series A yet. A root acquainted pinch nan woody says nan startup’s valuation is complete $100 million.

Paid came retired of stealth successful March offering an absorbing publication to nan AI agentic world: The institution doesn’t connection agents. It offers a measurement for supplier makers to complaint their customers for these worker algorithms, based connected nan worth their agents provide. This is simply a increasing taxable successful AI, sometimes called “results-based billing.”

Paid promises to thief supplier makers “start charging for points of separator saved by their customers,” Medina describes. 

It’s a caller measurement of charging for package for nan AI age. This is alternatively of nan unlimited use, per-user fees of nan SaaS era, aliases nan unlimited use, buy-it-once-and-install-it fees of nan client/server era. 

Per-user fees don’t activity because supplier makers salary usage fees to nan exemplary providers arsenic good arsenic to unreality providers. Unlimited usage could thrust them into nan red. (The vibe coding startup world tends to suffer from this issue.) 

Agent providers alternatively “need to show nan worth nan supplier is delivering to your customers, because agents are moving successful nan inheritance for nan astir part,” Medina tells TechCrunch. If agents do activity arsenic advertised, past they’ll beryllium assigned progressively more, pinch their increasing workloads going unnoticed.

“If you’re a quiet agent, you don’t get paid,” Madina says. “You request an infrastructure that allows nan supplier to complaint for nan further activity that nan supplier is doing,”  

But charging a monthly interest for a constricted number of credits — pursuing nan exemplary makers and vibe coders — is risky for agent-makers, too. That’s because companies don’t want to salary for AI slop, which is still what astir AI produces. After billions spent connected AI pilots, immoderate 95% of endeavor projects were recovered to person nary value, pinch only 5% put into production, according to a caller study from MIT.

Companies don’t want to salary agents to nutrient much emails that nary 1 reads. 

One of nan startup’s early customers, for instance, is Artisan, the viral income automation startup. (By nan way, you tin perceive Artisan’s CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack speak connected nan taxable astatine TechCrunch Disrupt adjacent month.) 

But Paid is besides starting to spot occurrence pinch SaaS companies looking astatine agents for their adjacent large growth. The startup conscionable landed ERP vendor IFS arsenic a caller customer, it said. 

Lightspeed’s Alexander Schmitt says nan task patient has invested “more than $2.5 cardinal into AI infrastructure and exertion furniture companies complete nan past 3 years,” and has witnessed firsthand that astir AI pilots fail.  

“The halfway of that problem is that nary 1 tin really connect worth to what agents are doing today,” Schmitt said.  

Schmitt thinks that Paid is, truthful far, unsocial successful its approach, saying “it’s thing that we haven’t seen personification other build.” No uncertainty much title for agentic results-based billing will travel if it really does thief agents participate nan workforce en mass.

New investor FUSE and existing investor EQT Ventures besides participated successful nan round.