Manny Medina, previously best known as the founder of Sales Automation Startup Outreach (valued at $4.4 billion), has surprised investors with his young startup, Payments.
Pay has over-closed a $11.6 million seed round led by Lightspeed. The 10 million euro seed round raised in March has already raised $33.3 million, and has not yet a hit Series A. Sources accustomed to trading say the startups are valuing more than $100 million.
The paid version came out of stealth in March. It offers an interesting contribution to the world of AI agents. The company does not provide agents. Provides a way for agent manufacturers to bill customers for these worker algorithms based on the value the agents provide. This is a growing theme in AI, sometimes known as “results-based billing.”
Medina explains that the agent maker has a paid promise to help start charging points for margins saved by customers.
This is a new way to charge software in the AI era. This is in place of unlimited usage in the SaaS era, per-user fees, or the handling fees for Buy It Oon and installation fees for client/server ERAs.
Per-user fees don’t work as agent makers pay usage fees to model and cloud providers. Unlimited use allows them to be driven to red. (The world of vibe coding startups tends to suffer from this problem.)
Instead, agent providers need to “show the value that agents are offering to their customers, because agents are mostly running in the background,” Medina tells TechCrunch. If agents function as advertised, they receive more and more allocations and their growing workload is unnoticed.
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“If you’re a quiet agent, you won’t receive a reward,” says Madina. “We need infrastructure that allows agents to bill for additional work that they are doing.”
However, charging a limited number of credit monthly fees according to model makers and vibe coders is also dangerous for agent makers. This is because companies don’t want to pay for AI slops. This is something that most AI produces. A recent MIT study found that after billions of billions were spent on AI pilots, about 95% of enterprise projects were worthless, with only 5% in production.
Companies don’t want to pay agents to create more emails than no one reads.
For example, one of the startup’s early customers is a craftsman, a viral sales automation startup. (By the way, you can hear Artisan CEO Jasper Carmichael Jack talk about the topic next month in TechCrunch’s confusion.)
However, pay is also beginning to be successful in SaaS companies looking at agents for the next big growth. The startup said it has just landed ERP vendor IF as a new customer.
Lightspeed’s Alexander Schmitt said the venture “invested more than $2.5 billion in AI infrastructure and application layer companies over the past three years,” and witnessed first-hand the failure of most AI pilots.
“The heart of that problem is that agents can’t really value what they’re doing today,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt thinks the approach is unique so far, saying “it’s something I’ve never seen anyone else build it.” If agents actually help agents join the workforce, there will be more competition for an outcome-based claim for agents.
New investor Fughes and existing investor EQT Ventures also participated in the round.
