As the year progresses with an increasing focus on AI agents, a significant trend is emerging involving startups that provide the necessary tools for employers to develop a bot-based workforce.
Manny Medina, recognized as the founder and former CEO of the sales automation company Outreach, valued at $4.4 billion, has recently unveiled a new startup named Paid. This development was exclusively reported to TechCrunch. Paid is not involved in the creation of AI agents, but instead provides a platform designed to ensure that these agents are compensated profitably. On Monday, Paid announced the successful raising of €10 million (approximately $11 million) in a pre-seed investment round from EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund.
Medina was inspired to create Paid after engaging in discussions over several months with numerous agentic platform startups. A recurring issue identified during these conversations was uncertainty regarding appropriate pricing models. Medina shared with TechCrunch that the traditional software pricing strategies are not applicable for AI agents. Companies producing agentic platforms cannot rely on per user or per seat pricing models, as one employee may operate multiple agents, or these agents may function independently without human oversight.
Additionally, companies developing AI agents cannot adopt the usage-based pricing model typical of SaaS, since AI agents are expected to fulfill comprehensive roles. Medina explained that customers would prefer to pay for the outcomes delivered by the agents, rather than for each individual task performed, emphasizing a results-based compensation model. For instance, in the insurance sector, a company might wish to compensate based on completed policy renewals rather than each email sent by the agent.
The costs associated with deploying agents can fluctuate, dependent on the number of LLM tokens required for training and task execution. Medina raised the question of how startups can effectively price the roles delivered by these agents, noting the need for flexibility in pricing strategies and the ability to evaluate profit margins.
Addressing these challenges, Paid enables agentic startups to establish pricing models—whether fixed or variable—focused on achieving profitable margins. Furthermore, the platform monitors the output of these agents, allowing startups to verify the return on investment.
Paid is described as the AI agent era’s equivalent of integrating Zuora (for SaaS renewal billing) with SuccessFactors (for SaaS HR management). The platform is primarily targeted at startups rather than large enterprises like Salesforce and Microsoft, which also offer agentic platforms. Paid currently has three beta customers: Logic.app, 11x, Vidlab7, Artisan, and HappyRobot.
According to Medina, agents are progressively assuming human roles, if not entire jobs. He is also leveraging AI technology to build this new venture, with Paid’s engineers using platforms such as V0, Replit, and Lovable to code the initial product demonstrations. Remarkably, the initial build of the platform was completed in a month by just two engineers, highlighting the advantages of using AI in the development process.
Medina has a history of building successful companies. His prior experience includes taking Outreach from inception in 2011 to a workforce of 800 employees and generating $250 million in annual recurring revenue by the time he stepped down as CEO in September. Medina resigned from the executive chairman position in March, while continuing to serve on the board. He, along with Paid, is currently based in London.
