Revolutionary Paid Startup: Manny Medina Unveils Lucrative AI Agent Billing Solution

The world of artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving, and 2024 is shaping up to be the year of the AI agent. As businesses increasingly explore the potential of these autonomous digital workers, a critical infrastructure is needed to support their growth and, crucially, their compensation. Enter Paid, a groundbreaking new venture from Manny Medina, the visionary founder of Outreach. Paid isn’t building AI agents themselves; instead, they are providing the essential financial rails – the picks and shovels, if you will – to ensure these digital entities, and the companies deploying them, thrive in this new era. Bitcoin World had the exclusive scoop on this exciting development.

Decoding the Challenge of AI Agent Pricing

Manny Medina, fresh off his success at sales automation giant Outreach (valued at a staggering $4.4 billion), recognized a significant gap in the burgeoning AI agents landscape. After extensive conversations with numerous agentic platform startups, a recurring pain point emerged: how do you effectively and profitably charge for the work of AI agents?

The traditional software pricing models simply don’t translate to this paradigm shift. Forget per-user or per-seat licenses – the very essence of AI agents is their ability to operate autonomously and at scale. One human employee might oversee dozens, or even hundreds, of agents. Similarly, usage-based pricing, reminiscent of the SaaS revolution, also falls short. If AI agents are truly effective, they are designed to take over entire roles, not just perform discrete tasks.

Medina astutely points out, “An agent’s customer doesn’t want to pay for all the discrete tasks an agent does – if it even knows them all. They want to pay for its results, like an employee.” Imagine an AI agent deployed in insurance, tasked with policy renewals. The client isn’t concerned with the number of emails sent or actions taken; they care about the successful policy renewals generated.

This outcome-based expectation clashes with the variable costs associated with running AI agents, primarily driven by the consumption of LLM tokens during training and task execution. This complexity creates a significant hurdle for startups in the AI agent space. “So how do you help them price for the job that they’re delivering?” Medina questioned, highlighting the core problem Paid aims to solve. These startups need the flexibility to experiment with different AI pricing strategies and, crucially, to accurately measure their profit margins.

Paid: Bridging Billing and HR for the AI Agent Era

The novelty of AI agents means that fundamental business processes, like profitable billing and renewals, are still largely uncharted territory. Paid steps in to provide this crucial framework. The platform empowers agentic startups to craft sophisticated AI pricing models – whether fixed or variable – with a laser focus on achieving profitable margins.

Beyond just billing, Paid also incorporates agent output tracking. This dual functionality allows startups to not only optimize their agent billing strategies but also to rigorously validate the return on investment (ROI) generated by their AI agents. Think of it as the next-generation evolution of SaaS business tools: Zuora (the leader in SaaS renewal billing) converging with SuccessFactors (a powerhouse in SaaS HR management), specifically tailored for the age of AI agents.

Paid’s initial target market is startups, rather than established enterprise giants like Salesforce or Microsoft, which are also venturing into agentic platforms. However, by focusing on the startups building the next wave of AI innovation, Paid is positioning itself at the very heart of the AI agent revolution. Already, Paid boasts an impressive roster of beta customers, including Logic.app, 11x, Vidlab7, Artisan, and HappyRobot, showcasing the immediate need and appeal of their platform.

The Power of AI in Building Paid

Medina emphasizes the transformative impact of AI not just on the solutions Paid enables, but also on the very process of building the company itself. “Agents are replacing roles, human roles, not the entire job, but entire roles,” Medina stated, underscoring the profound shift underway. He’s putting this philosophy into practice by leveraging AI tools to accelerate Paid’s development.

The initial product demos for Paid were “vibe coded” by their engineers using cutting-edge AI-powered tools like V0, Replit, and Lovable. Medina is clearly excited about this new paradigm of company building. “This is what is so much fun about building a company right now. We have two engineers, and we have built the entirety of the building platform in a month. Why? Because we build everything on AI,” he revealed, highlighting the unprecedented speed and efficiency AI brings to software development.

Manny Medina: From Outreach to Paid – A Serial Entrepreneur’s Journey

Manny Medina’s track record speaks for itself. His journey with Outreach is a testament to his entrepreneurial prowess. From its humble beginnings in 2011, he steered Outreach to become a dominant force in sales automation, scaling it to 800 employees and $250 million in annual recurring revenue by the time he stepped down as CEO in September. While he later relinquished his executive chairman role in March (remaining on the board), Medina’s entrepreneurial spirit remains as vibrant as ever. Now based in London, he is channeling his experience and vision into Paid, ready to tackle the next frontier of business in the AI agent era.

Paid’s successful €10 million (approximately $11 million) pre-seed funding round, led by European powerhouse EQT Ventures, alongside Sequoia and GTMFund, is a strong validation of Medina’s vision and the critical need for a platform like Paid. As AI agents become increasingly integral to the business landscape, Paid is poised to become the indispensable infrastructure that ensures their economic viability and fuels the continued growth of this transformative technology.

To learn more about the latest AI market trends, explore our article on key developments shaping AI features.