As the era of AI agents gains momentum, a novel trend is emerging, with startups now offering essential tools to help employers create a workforce of bots.

Manny Medina, the renowned founder and former CEO of Outreach, a sales automation company valued at $4.4 billion, has recently launched a new startup called Paid, which he exclusively revealed to TechCrunch.

Paid doesn’t develop AI agents itself, but instead provides a platform that enables profitable payment processing for these agents. The company announced on Monday that it has secured €10 million (approximately $11 million) in pre-seed funding from prominent investors, including European powerhouse EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund.

Medina conceived the idea for Paid after engaging in extensive discussions with numerous agentic platform startups, during which a common challenge emerged: determining appropriate pricing for their services. “They were unclear about what to charge,” Medina explained to TechCrunch.

The underlying principle of Paid is that traditional software pricing models are inapplicable to AI agents. Agentic companies cannot charge per user or per seat, as the entire point of AI agents is that a single employee can manage multiple agents, or the agents can operate independently without human oversight.

Companies developing AI agents also cannot adopt the pricing strategy employed by the previous generation of software, SaaS, which charges based on usage. This is because, if AI agents function as intended, they “assume an entire role,” according to Medina.

The client of an AI agent does not want to pay for individual tasks performed by the agent, especially if they are unaware of all the tasks being executed. Instead, they want to pay for the agent’s results, similar to how they would compensate an employee. For instance, if an agent is hired in the insurance industry and its success is measured by completed policy renewals, the company does not want to pay for each email sent by the agent.

Meanwhile, the costs associated with providing AI agents vary, depending on the number of LLM tokens required for training and task execution.

The question then becomes, “How can we assist these startups in pricing their services based on the job they deliver?” Medina asked, highlighting the need for flexibility in pricing and the ability to measure margins.

Billing meets HR management

Given the novelty of AI agents, startups have not yet had to deal with the processes involved in profitable billing, let alone renewals. Paid enables agentic startups to create pricing models, whether fixed or variable, with a focus on maintaining profitable margins.

By doing so, it also tracks the output of AI agents, allowing startups to validate the return on investment.

This platform represents the fusion of billing and HR management, akin to Zuora (SaaS renewal billing software) and SuccessFactors (SaaS HR management software), tailored for the era of AI agents.

Paid is targeting startups, rather than large enterprises like Salesforce and Microsoft, which are also offering agentic platforms. The company has already secured three startups as beta customers: Logic.app, 11x, VidLab7, Artisan, and HappyRobot.

“AI agents are replacing specific roles, not entire jobs, but rather discrete roles,” Medina stated.

Medina is practicing what he preaches by leveraging AI to build Paid. The company’s engineers utilized AI-powered tools like v0, Replit, and Lovable to create the initial product demos.

“This is what makes building a company so exciting right now. With just two engineers, we’ve developed the entire platform in a month, thanks to AI,” he exclaimed.

Medina has a proven track record of building successful companies from scratch. As the former CEO of Outreach, which he founded in 2011, he grew the company to 800 employees and $250 million in annual recurring revenue before leaving the CEO role in September.

Medina stepped down as executive chairman in March but remains on the board. He and Paid are now based in London.