AI Agents Getting Paid Like Employees? This New Startup is Making It Happen
As AI-powered agents continue to take over business operations, a pressing question arises: How should these digital workers be compensated? A new startup, aptly named Paid, is tackling this challenge head-on. Founded by Manny Medina, the mastermind behind the $4.4 billion sales automation giant Outreach, Paid aims to revolutionize how AI agents get paid.
Medina’s latest venture is making waves in the AI space by addressing a crucial issue—pricing models for AI-driven workforce automation. On Monday, Paid announced a €10 million ($11 million) pre-seed investment from leading investors, including EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund. The funding underscores the growing importance of AI billing solutions in a rapidly evolving industry.
Why Pricing AI Agents is a Challenge
After spending months speaking with startups developing AI agents, Medina discovered a recurring challenge: these companies had no clear way to determine pricing. Traditional software pricing models—charging per user or per seat—are incompatible with AI agents, which can operate independently or be managed by a single employee handling multiple agents.
Furthermore, AI companies can’t simply adopt the standard Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pricing model, which charges based on usage. Unlike conventional SaaS tools, AI agents take over entire job roles rather than just assisting with tasks. Companies want to pay for results, not individual actions.
For example, in the insurance sector, AI agents handling policy renewals wouldn’t be paid per email sent but rather for successfully completed renewals. Meanwhile, the operating costs of these agents are unpredictable, fluctuating based on the amount of computing power and Large Language Model (LLM) tokens required to perform tasks.
How Paid Solves the Problem
Paid is designed to help AI startups develop flexible, profitable billing strategies. It enables them to experiment with different pricing models, measure margins, and track agent performance—similar to how SaaS platforms like Zuora handle subscription billing and SuccessFactors manages HR operations.
By providing a structured pricing mechanism, Paid ensures that AI agents are treated as real contributors to businesses, complete with ROI validation. The startup is currently targeting early-stage AI companies rather than corporate giants like Salesforce or Microsoft, which are also investing heavily in AI agent development.
AI Agents Are Replacing Roles, Not Entire Jobs
Medina emphasizes that AI agents are not replacing entire jobs but rather specific roles within organizations. His platform has already signed up several beta customers, including Logic.app, 11x, VidLab7, Artisan, and HappyRobot.
Interestingly, Paid itself is leveraging AI to build its own infrastructure. Medina revealed that his team of just two engineers developed the entire product demo in one month, using AI-powered development tools like v0, Replit, and Lovable.
“This is what’s so exciting about building a company today,” Medina said. “We have a small team, but we’re moving at lightning speed because we’re using AI for everything.”
The Vision Behind Paid
Manny Medina is no stranger to building groundbreaking companies. As a former Microsoft executive, he established Outreach in 2011, growing it from scratch to a thriving business with 800 employees and $250 million in annual recurring revenue before stepping down as CEO in September.
Now based in London, Medina is focusing entirely on Paid, which he believes will play a crucial role in shaping the future of AI-powered businesses. With AI agents becoming increasingly integral to operations, Paid is pioneering a way for them to be compensated fairly and efficiently.
Final Thoughts
AI agents are quickly transforming industries, but figuring out how to pay them is a major hurdle. Paid is stepping up to bridge this gap, offering innovative billing solutions that ensure AI-driven companies remain profitable. With strong investor backing and a visionary founder at the helm, Paid is poised to redefine how businesses compensate their digital workforce.
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