As AI-powered agents become more prevalent in the workplace, a new challenge is emerging—how to bill and pay them effectively. Manny Medina, the founder and former CEO of sales automation giant Outreach, has launched Paid, a platform designed to address this issue. Rather than developing AI agents, Paid ensures they are compensated fairly and profitably, creating a new standard for AI-driven workforces.
The company, which just secured €10 million (about $11 million) in pre-seed funding from EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund, is tackling a fundamental problem: traditional software pricing models don’t apply to AI agents. Unlike human employees, AI agents don’t fit into a per-user or per-seat pricing structure, nor do they align with the usage-based model commonly used in SaaS. Instead, Paid allows AI startups to charge based on results—such as completed tasks or successful business outcomes—rather than individual actions like sending emails or generating reports.
Beyond billing, Paid also functions as an AI HR management system, tracking agent output, measuring return on investment, and enabling companies to experiment with different pricing structures. It’s being positioned as a modern blend of SaaS billing platforms like Zuora and HR management tools like SuccessFactors.
Currently, Paid is focused on serving startups rather than large enterprises, and it already has several early customers, including Logic.app, 11x, VidLab7, Artisan, and HappyRobot. Medina, now based in London, is also embracing AI-driven development for his own company, using tools like v0, Replit, and Lovable to rapidly build the platform with a small engineering team.
With his track record of growing Outreach into a $4.4 billion company, Medina’s latest venture signals a shift in how businesses will integrate and compensate AI-driven workforces in the years to come.