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Published on
September 29, 2025
5 min read
AI Agent Results-Based Billing: Paid Raises $21.6 Million in Seed Funding Round
In Focus
- London-based AI Agent Billing Startup Paid has raised $21.6 million in seed funding
- Paid raised $11 million in pre-seed funding back in March 2025
- Lightspeed led Paid’s seed funding round. The venture capital firm says Paid’s approach to AI agent billing is unique
- AI agent developers face monthly fee risks as enterprises keep off unrefined outputs from computer systems
London-based AI startup Paid has raised $21.6 million in a seed funding round. According to TechCrunch, the recent funding round brings the total amount raised by the results-based billing AI agent firm to about $33 million. Paid raised $11 million in a pre-seed round in March 2025. The AI agent billing startup was founded by Manny Medina, who also founded Outreach, the sales automation startup that’s valued at $4.4 billion.
Monetizing AI Agents
The Manny Medina startup notes that more tasks are often assigned to high-performing AI agents. Since agents work in the background, the growing workload tends to go unnoticed. Paid addresses this gap by supporting AI agent monetization. According to Medina, the startup enables developers to “start charging for points of margin saved by their customers.”
However, the Paid founder emphasizes the need for AI agents developers to demonstrate the value that their solutions provide to customers. AI agent providers “need to show the value the agent is delivering to your customers, because agents are running in the background for the most part. If you’re a quiet agent, you don’t get paid. You need an infrastructure that allows the agent to charge for the additional work that the agent is doing,” Medina adds.
Paid does not develop AI agents. Rather, the company provides an avenue for agent developers to charge customers for using their AI agents depending on the value the agents provide. This emerging model for charging for software in the AI age is known as results-based billing. It replaces the per-user fee model, which characterised the SaaS era.
Results-based billing also replaces the unlimited use buy-it-once-and-install-it fee applied in the server era. Per-user fees are not ideal for the AI agentic world because developers have to pay usage fees to model providers and cloud providers. Even so, Perplexity applies this model to its new email management AI agent. The unlimited use model does not work either because it could cause developers to incur losses.
Key Takeaways
- AI agents that perform as advertised are assigned additional tasks that often go unnoticed
- Paid helps AI agent developers to monetize their agents based on the value that the agents offer customers
- Using Paid’s billing model, AI agent developers can start charging for points of margin saved by their customers
- Paid’s results-based billing model replaces charging models like per-user fee and unlimited use fee that don’t work well with software in the AI age
Risks Associated with Monthly Fees
AI agent developers find it risky to charge a monthly fee for a set number of credits. This is largely because enterprises are reluctant to pay for unrefined outputs from AI systems, which is what the majority of AI produces. An MIT study recently found that only 5% of enterprise AI projects move to production, with 95% of them offering no value.
Tech research firm Gartner also warned that over 40% of agentic AI projects could fail due to rising costs, insufficient risk controls, and the lack of clarity regarding the business value that AI agents offer. Despite these challenges, Paid is beginning to attract SaaS firms that consider AI agents as the next big thing. The company said it recently onboard ERP vendor IFS as its customers. Lightspeed, the venture capital that led the “Paid” startup seed funding round termed the company’s approach to billing as unique.
“It’s something that we haven’t seen someone else build,” Lightspeed’s Alexander Schmitt said. Schmitt added that the venture capital firm has invested over “$2.5 billion into AI infrastructure and application layer companies over the last three years.” Schmitt added that his firm has also seen the majority of AI pilots fail. “The core of that problem is that no one can really attach value to what agents are doing today,” he added. If Paid succeeds in facilitating the entry of AI agent developers into the workforce, it will encounter competition. FUSE and existing Paid backer EQT also participated in the latest seed funding round.
