As the year of AI agents takes shape, new trends are emerging. It is a startup that offers picks and shovels to help employers build a bot workforce.
Best known as the founder and former CEO of Outreach, a treasured $4.4 billion sales automation company, Manny Medina, has just launched such a startup called Pay, and has spoken exclusively to TechCrunch.
Paid AI agents will not be created. Provide a platform to ensure that you are paid profitably. The paid announced on Monday that it had raised 10 million euros (approximately $11 million) in pre-seed investments from European powerhouse EQT ventures, Sequoia and GTMFund.
Medina came up with the idea of a paid leave after several months of discussion with a startup on the agent platform for decades. These conversations have shown general dissatisfaction. “They really didn’t know what to charge,” Medina told TechCrunch.
The assumption that it is paid is that older methods of charging software will not work with AI agents. Agent companies cannot charge per user or per seat. That is, it’s based on the number of people using the software (such as the old-school Microsoft Office). The overall point is that one employee can run many agents. Or the agent runs on his own, with no human supervisor at all.
Companies developing AI agents can’t even charge them like last major generation changes, SaaS, or billing for use of software. If the agent works properly, “it takes over the overall role,” says Medina.
Agent customers do not want to pay for all the individual tasks the agent does. They want to pay for the outcome like employees. So, if an agent is hired by insurance and the role has been measured with a completed insurance renewal, the company does not want to pay for each email sent by the agent.
At the same time, the costs associated with providing agents vary depending on the number of LLM tokens needed to perform the training.
“So how do you help with the price of the jobs they’re offering?” Medina said of the startups that provide agents. “They needed the ability to try new things with different customers. They needed the ability to measure their margins.”
Billing meets HR management
Agents were so new that they didn’t have to deal with the process of providing profitable billing, let alone start-ups. Paid allows agent startups to look to profitable margins and price fixed or variables.
This will also track the agent’s output. This also allows startups to verify their return on investment.
This is the AI agent ERA version of Zuora (SaaS Renewal Billing Software) and meets SuccessFactors (SaaS HR Management Software).
Paid platforms are sold to startups rather than companies like Salesforce or Microsoft, which provide agent platforms. Pay has three companies, including beta customers. There are Logic.App, 11x, Vidlab7, Artisan, and Happyrobot.
“Agents are replacing roles, human roles, not entire roles, not entire roles,” says Medina.
He also practices how he preaches, using AI to build this new startup. Paid Engineer Vibe coded its first product demo with tools such as V0, Replit, and Lovable.
“This is a lot of fun building a company right now. We have two engineers. Within a month we built the entire building platform. Why? Because we’re building everything in AI,” he said.
Medina experiences building businesses from nothing. Former Microsoftie, who has been part of Seattle’s tech scene for decades, earned outreach from $0 when he founded $250 million in 2011 with 800 employees and recurring annual revenue before resigning from the CEO role in September.
Medina left the role of executive chair in March, but he remains on the board. He and Payment are currently based in London.
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