Manny Medina, the former CEO and founder of Outreach, a $4.4 billion-valued sales automation company, has launched a new venture called Paid. The mission of the company is to empower agentic startups to price their AI agents profitably. Medina was inspired to do so after he spent a few months discussing pain points with different agentic platform startups, and the founders were generally struggling with determining the appropriate price to charge for their AI-driven services.
The traditional software charging models, i.e., per-user or per-seat pricing, don’t work for AI agents. This is because one employee can manage multiple agents, or the agents can operate independently without a human touch. In addition, AI agents are created to execute entire jobs rather than individual tasks, so charging per task they execute is not possible. Rather, customers are willing to pay for the output produced by such agents, as they would compensate human workers.
Paid offers an interface that enables agentic startups to create elastic pricing plans, fixed or variable, with focus on maintaining profitable margins. Paid also tracks performance of AI agents so that startups can check return on investment and adjust their pricing models in relation. This is comparable to harvesting the best of SaaS billing software such as Zuora and combining it with HR management software such as SuccessFactors but for the AI agent era.
Medina’s own vision for Paid is to make AI agent billing and observability more straightforward so that businesses can focus more on growth and driving value to customers. The company has already been funded with €10 million pre-seed capital by top-notch investors such as EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund. Paid is targeting startups, not behemoths such as Salesforce and Microsoft, which are also constructing agentic platforms. Paid currently has a number of beta clients, including Logic.app, 11x, Vidlab7, Artisan, and HappyRobot.
The shift to outcome-based pricing is seen as a game-changer for AI companies, transforming them from providers of software to outcome partners. The approach aligns incentives with customers based on outcomes rather than access to technology alone. Medina emphasizes that the future of AI lies not in the technology but in the new business models it enables.
In developing Paid, Medina is leveraging AI technologies to accelerate development at a quicker rate, reflecting his past experience in building companies from scratch. He did it previously with Outreach, building it from the ground up to become a significant player in the tech industry, reaching 800 employees and $250 million in annual recurring revenue before stepping down as CEO. Now based in London, Medina continues to make a profound impact on the world of AI through Paid.
The AI agent revolution is not just technological but also relates to how companies capture value. As AI agents are used more and more, how companies make money from these technologies will be radically different. Paid is at the forefront of this, helping companies navigate the complexity of charging for AI and setting them up for success in a rapidly changing world.
