Manny Medina, previously best-known as the founder of sales automation startup Outreach ($4.4 billion valuation), has wowed investors with his young startup, Paid.
Paid just closed an oversubscribed $21.6 million seed round led by Lightspeed. With the €10 million pre-seed round it raised in March, London-based Paid has already raised $33.3 million and hasn’t even hit its Series A yet. A source familiar with the deal says the startup’s valuation is over $100 million.
Paid came out of stealth in March offering an interesting contribution to the AI agentic world: The company doesn’t offer agents. It offers a way for agent makers to charge their customers for these worker algorithms, based on the value their agents provide. This is a growing theme in AI, sometimes called “results-based billing.”
Paid promises to help agent makers “start charging for points of margin saved by their customers,” Medina describes.
It’s a new way of charging for software for the AI age. This is instead of the unlimited use, per-user fees of the SaaS era, or the unlimited use, buy-it-once-and-install-it fees of the client/server era.
