Manny Medina, former Outreach CEO, successfully raised 11 million USD for Paid platform, helping AI Agent companies determine effective and profitable pricing strategies.
The AI Agent landscape is emerging as a new wave in the technology industry, driving demand for tools supporting the "robot workforce". Catching this trend, Manny Medina – founder of the 4.4 billion USD sales automation company Outreach – has just launched the startup Paid to address a critical challenge: how to ensure AI Agents are paid profitably.
Paid does not build AI Agents but provides a platform helping agentic companies price their services. The startup has just announced successfully raising 10 million euros (approximately 11 million USD) in a pre-seed funding round from notable investors like EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund.
The idea for Paid emerged after Medina spent months discussing with dozens of agentic platform startups and realized a common problem: "They really don't know how much to charge."
Traditional Pricing Models Are No Longer Suitable
According to Medina, traditional software pricing methods will not work for AI Agents. User or seat-based pricing models have become obsolete because one employee can operate multiple agents, or agents can work completely independently without supervision.
SaaS usage-based pricing models are also unsuitable for agents, as in an ideal scenario, agents will "take on entire roles" rather than just performing individual tasks.
"A customer of an agent doesn't want to pay for each specific task the agent performs. They want to pay for results, like hiring an employee," Medina shared. For example, if an agent works in insurance, the company would want to pay based on the number of contract renewals completed, not the number of emails the agent sent.
Meanwhile, agent operating costs vary depending on the number of LLM tokens required for their training and task execution.
Paid solves this issue by allowing agentic startups to establish pricing structures – fixed or variable – with specific profit goals. The platform also tracks agent output, helping companies assess investment effectiveness (ROI).
Paid can be seen as a combination of Zuora (SaaS renewal payment software) and SuccessFactors (human resource management software) for the AI Agent era.
Currently, Paid is in beta with 5 customers: Logic.app, 11x, VidLab7, Artisan, and HappyRobot. Notably, Paid itself is applying AI in product development. The company's engineers have built initial demos using tools like v0, Replit, and Lovable.
"This is the most exciting thing about building a company right now. We have two engineers and have built the entire platform within a month thanks to AI," Medina shared.
With experience from Outreach – a company he grew from zero to 250 million USD in annual recurring revenue and 800 employees before leaving the CEO position last September – Medina is expected to repeat his success with Paid, a startup currently based in London.
