Paid, the AI agent ‘results-based billing’ startup from Manny Medina, raises huge $21M seed

Manny Medina, previously best known as the founder of the Startup Outreach of Sales Automation ($ 4.4 billion rating), has surprised investors surprised with his young startup.

Paid has just been a overvalued seed round of $ 21.6 million led under Lightspeed. With the pre-seed round of € 10 million that it collected in March, the Paid, based in London, has already collected $ 33.3 million and has not even touched its Serie A. A source that is familiar with the deal says that the rating of the startup is more than $ 100 million.

Paid came from Stealth in March and offered an interesting contribution to the AI ​​Agentic World: the company does not offer agents. It offers a way for agent makers to charge their customers for these employee algorithms, based on the value that their agents offer. This is a growing theme in AI, also called ‘on results -based invoicing’.

Paid promises to help agent manufacturers to “start charging the marples saved by their customers,” Medina describes.

It is a new way to charge for software for the AI ​​era. Instead of the unlimited use, per user costs of the SaaS era, or the unlimited use, buy-it-and-install-it allowances of the client/server era.

Per user costs do not work because agent makers pay for operating costs to the model providers and cloud providers. She could float unlimited use in red. (The startup world of the atmosphere tends to suffer from this problem.)

Instead, agent providers “must show the value that the agent delivers to your customers, because agents largely walk in the background,” says Medina WAN. If agents work as advertised, they are increasingly assigned, where their growing workload unnoticed.

“If you are a calm agent, you will not be paid,” says Madina. “You need an infrastructure with which the agent can be charged for the extra work that the agent does,”

But the charging of a monthly fee for a limited number of credits, according to the model makers and atmosphere coders is also risky for agent makers. That is because companies do not want to pay for AI Slop, that is still what most AI produces. After billions have been spent on AI pilots, it turned out that around 95% of the business projects were not value, with only 5% in production, according to A recent study by MIT.

Companies do not want to pay agents to produce more e -mails that nobody reads.

One of the early customers of the startup is, for example, Artisan, the startup of viral sales automation. (By the way, you can hear the CEO of Artisan Jaspar Carmichael-Jack talk about the subject at WAN Disrupt next month.)

But paid is also starting to see success with Saas companies that look at agents for their next major growth. The startup has just landed ERP supplier as a new customer, said it.

Alexander Schmitt from Lightspeed says that the venture company has invested in the past three years “more than $ 2.5 billion in AI infrastructure and application agencies”, and has witnessed the first hand to fail most AI pilots.

“The core of that problem is that nobody can really value what agents do today,” said Schmitt.

Schmitt thinks that Paid so far is unique in his approach and says, “It is something that we have not seen someone else build.” Undoubtedly, more competition will come to come on agent results -based invoicing if it really helps agents to enter the workforce and mass.

New investment insurance and existing investors EQT Ventures also participated in De Ronde.