BREAKING: Monetizing AI Agents w/ Paid
Manny Medina, CEO (Prev. CEO of $4.4B, Outreach)
Monetizing AI Agents
Manny Medina, Co-Founder & CEO of Paid and former CEO of $4.4B Sales Tech company, Outreach, joins me in London to discuss the early development of AI agents & what this shift means for software businesses.
Roughly $300 billion in SaaS revenue remains “trapped” in legacy pricing and delivery models. After scaling Outreach to 6,000 customers, 220,000 active users, and $250M in ARR, Manny saw firsthand that many SaaS monetization frameworks don’t fit agentic systems, which perform full end-to-end workflows rather than individual user-driven tasks. This gap led him to build Paid, the platform designed to help companies measure, price, & manage the economics of agents.
Paid is backed by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, EQT Ventures, GTM Fund, & FUSE. (thank you to Max at GTM Fund for the intro!)
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$33.3M to Build Infra for the AI Agent Economy
Paid has now raised $33.3 million in total funding, following its oversubscribed $21.6M Seed round in September led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from FUSE & existing investor EQT Ventures.. this fast follows the March 2025 €10M financing led by EQT & Sequoia Capital, with participation from GTM Fund, Exceptional Capital, and strategic angel investors.
This capital supports Paid’s mission to provide the economic & operational infrastructure needed for companies to price, track, & monetize AI agents effectively. Early customers have reported 20–40% revenue growth within six months of adopting the platform.
As autonomous AI agents continue to expand across industries, they are beginning to automate complex workflows, replace entire departments, and deliver outcomes traditionally handled by teams. This shift exposes limitations in the legacy per-seat SaaS pricing model, which was not built for software that performs full roles independently. Without the right tools to measure agent activity, understand cost, & structure pricing, many organizations struggle to commercialize agentic workflows.
Paid aims to solve this by giving AI agent builders, from early-stage founders to large SaaS companies, the infrastructure needed to scale sustainably in a rapidly growing market projected to reach $19.9 trillion in economic contribution by 2030.
BREAKING: Paid launches Adaptive Credits
Launching today, Paid now offers flexible credit system designed for today’s AI pricing needs. Paid has rethought credits from an opaque way of charging for AI work into a clearer, more practical model that supports real usage, consumption, & growth for AI and agent builders.
Overview of our 20 Min Conversation
Manny covers emerging patterns around how companies are adopting agents, how they think about headcount and operational budgets, and why some organizations are re-evaluating the traditional seat-based SaaS model. He also explains why Paid is based in London, how the company approaches recruiting technical talent, & how practices like high-agency work & forward-deployed engineering shape their culture.
The discussion offers a realistic view into how early agentic businesses are forming, what challenges they face in monetization and measurement, and how teams are adapting as this new category evolves.
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The State of AI Agents
AI agents are emerging as a new category of software that performs full job functions rather than augmenting individual tasks. Enabled by rapid advances in large language models, agents can operate autonomously across complex workflows such as customer support, underwriting, dealership operations, and compensation systems.
This shift expands software’s scope beyond traditional productivity tools, as agents can run continuously, handle complete processes, and replace work that previously required dedicated teams. As companies begin experimenting across industries, adoption is still early, but the direction points toward agents becoming a foundational part of digital operations.
Monetizing and Operating Agentic Businesses
This evolution exposes structural gaps in traditional SaaS monetization. Seat-based and usage-based pricing models were built for software that supports human workers, not software that performs full roles independently. Companies deploying agents increasingly need frameworks to measure outcomes, understand the cost of model operations, and price against the economic value generated.
Paid is building the financial and operational infrastructure for this shift, enabling billing, margin visibility, and revenue models tied to resolved cases, reduced headcount requirements, workflow consolidation, or other objective indicators of agent performance.
A Team Culture Rooted in High Agency & FDEs
Co-Founders
Manny Medina built Outreach from scratch to over 6,000 customers, 220,000 active users, and $250M in ARR. He experienced the AI agent pricing dilemma firsthand.
Manoj Ganapathy built InvoiceIT, which was acquired by Steelbrick and later became Salesforce Billing. He has 10+ years of experience building billing systems.
Arnon Shimoni built monetization systems at Pleo and Storytel
Raj Dosanjh YC Alumni & ex-Palantir
Paid’s team structure reflects practices commonly associated with Palantir’s engineering culture, emphasizing autonomy, direct customer engagement, and rapid iteration. Many team members operate in a forward-deployed model (even coming directly from Palantir’s London office - a hotbed for tech talent in the growing ecosystem there), embedding themselves with customers to understand real-world workflows and identify where agents can deliver measurable value.
Instead of rigid roadmaps, engineers are given problem spaces and the responsibility to determine what to build based on field insights. This high-agency approach, combined with an AI-native workforce comfortable with tools like Cursor and Code Interpreter, enables the team to move quickly in a category where both the technology and the business model are still being defined.
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