Latino Founder Raises $21M To Help AI Agent Makers Get Paid For Performance
Paid, an AI agent startup, has raised $21.6 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed. The London-based startup recently raised €10 million ($11.7 million) in a pre-seed round, meaning the company has raised $33.3 million and hasn’t even reached its Series A yet. The startup’s valuation exceeds $100 million, according to a source familiar with the deal, as reported by TechCrunch.
The startup was founded by Manny Medina, the Ecuador-born founder and former CEO of Outreach, a $4.4 billion sales automation company.
What is Paid?
Paid differs from other AI agent startups as it doesn’t offer agents. Instead, it provides a way for agent makers to charge their customers for these worker algorithms, based on the value their agents provide, which is called “results-based billing.”
Medina believed that the previous ways of charging for software wouldn’t work with AI agents. Agents are new to startups, so they haven’t dealt with processes that give profitable billing. Paid will allow agentic startups to create fixed or variable pricing whilst focusing on profitable margins.
The company offers an alternative approach to charging for software in the era of AI. As agent makers pay usage costs to both cloud and model suppliers, per-user prices are ineffective. Unrestricted use might put them in the red. (This problem tends to affect the atmosphere in the coding startup industry)
Agent providers instead “need to show the value the agent is delivering to your customers, because agents are running in the background for the most part,” Medina says to TechCrunch.
The latest fund
Alexander Schmitt, a partner at Lightspeed, says the venture firm has invested “more than $2.5 billion into AI infrastructure nd application layer companies over the last three years,” and has witnessed firsthand that most AI pilots fail. “The core of that problem is that no one can really attach value to what agents are doing today,” Schmitt added.
New investor FUSE and existing investor EQT Ventures also participated in the round.
Image: Geekwire
