Paid, a business engine for AI agents, today announced a €10 million pre-seed funding round led by EQT Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Paid’s mission is to grow the AI agent economy by helping AI agent companies accelerate their topline growth and profitability. With Paid, agent companies can price, invoice, bill, and manage margins. The most important innovation Paid brings to the AI agent market is the ability to track and improve margins while capturing more value for agent companies and finding the right price point for AI services.  

When I first met Manny Medina and the rest of the Paid team, it was immediately clear they tackled one of the biggest gaps in the AI space: the lack of monetization infrastructure for AI agents. The AI agent industry is projected to reach around $50 billion by 2030, yet many AI builders still rely on outdated invoicing and pricing models that don’t capture the value they create. This is a problem I’ve seen time and time again – brilliant technical teams building powerful AI applications, but struggling to monetize them effectively. That’s exactly what Paid wants to solve.

Right now, most agentic AI companies bill customers manually based on seats or charge per transaction, underselling the true value of agentic work. The reality is that AI agents don’t just automate existing workflows; they have the potential to replace traditional software, transform entire industries, and offer an entirely new way to deliver services. But without the right financial infrastructure in place, it’s incredibly difficult for AI companies to scale in a sustainable way.

How Paid Works

Paid’s platform is designed to give agentic AI companies the tools they need to grow their business:

• Performance Tracking & Attribution: Tools to track agentic performance in terms of actions performed, outcomes achieved, and returns generated. This makes pricing and packaging for agentic services easier for developers.
  
  

• Margin Intelligence: Real-time visibility into token costs and compute expenses to track profitability and potential burn. Paid continuously monitors per-agent and per-customer unit economics, alerting businesses before interactions or features become unprofitable.
  
  

• E2E Pricing & Billing: Sophisticated pricing tools that align costs with the value AI agents deliver. Making billing for agentic services transparent and seamless.

Paid’s co-founder Manny has built a category-defining company before, taking ‘Outreach’ from an initial idea to creating a new category, serving 6,000 customers, with 800 employees, and $250 million in annual recurring revenue. Manny truly understands what it takes to start and scale a market-leading product. With Paid, he aims to follow a similar trajectory—except this time, he’s ready to define an entirely new category.

Why We Invested

For me, investing in Paid is more than just backing a promising startup; it’s about helping to build the financial backbone of the AI economy. As AI agents become more capable, software companies fall into two camps: those layering AI onto existing products, and those building AI-native businesses from the ground up. The latter create autonomous AI workers that function more like employees than software tools, which means their monetization models need to evolve as well.

Paid is the first company I’ve seen that truly understands this shift. They don’t just offer a billing solution; they create the business engine for AI companies. By enabling AI builders to price their products based on outcomes—rather than arbitrary usage or subscription fees—Paid lays the groundwork for a new kind of software economy.

The Future of AI Monetization

The AI boom has triggered a fundamental rethink of how software is priced. For years, we’ve relied on predictable, seat-based pricing models; that model collapses in an AI-native world where agents, not humans, perform the work. Already today, we’re seeing a shift toward pricing models that align with business outcomes rather than access or usage. But getting this right isn’t easy.

Many AI companies I speak to struggle with pricing. They know they need to move beyond traditional SaaS pricing models, but they’re unsure how to do it in a way that ensures revenue predictability while still capturing the full value of their product. Paid provides that solution by defining agentic outcomes, creating transparent attribution mechanisms, and aligning value received by customers with costs.

This shift happens faster than many realize. Salesforce already launched Agentforce in 2024, pricing per AI-driven conversation rather than per user, and signing 1,000+ deals in weeks. More AI-native companies will follow, and Paid provides the infrastructure that will power them.

What’s Next

With this funding, Paid will accelerate product development and expand its London-based team. They recently launched an exclusive beta partner program, giving AI innovators early access to test and shape the platform. Companies like Logic.app, 11x, Vidlab7, and Artisan already use Paid, reporting significant improvements in margin visibility and pricing efficiency.

If you’re building in this space and want to help shape the future of AI monetization, I encourage you to check out Paid’s beta program at paid.ai.

At EQT Ventures, we’re always looking to back the picks and shovels of transformative industries. If you’re working on something at the intersection of AI and business infrastructure, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at doreen.huber@eqtventures.com, or connect with my colleagues Kaushik Subramanian and Conrad Schoo.

Paid’s progress so far has been truly impressive, as the team has moved fast, with high conviction, and incredible customer obsession. We’re excited to continue the journey by their side.