As the year of AI Agent takes shape, a new trend emerges: the newly formed businesses that offer options and shovels that help employers build a workforce of bots.
Manny Medina, known as the founder and former CEO of the $ 4.4 billion sales company, just started such a start -up called Pay, told TechCrunch exclusively.
Paid Does not make AI agents. It offers a platform that takes care to be paid, profitable. Payment announced on Monday that it increased € 10 million (about $ 11 million) in a pre-investment of European EQT Ventures, Sequoia and GTMFund.
Medina came with the idea of paying after months speaking to dozens of newly established platform businesses. In these conversations a joint complaint emerged. “They didn’t really know what to charge,” Medina told TechCrunch.
The prerequisite of the payment is that old ways of charging for software will not work with AI agents. Agentic companies cannot charge per user or by seat, which means how many people use software (such as Old School Microsoft Office). The whole thing is that an employee could run many agents. Or agents will run on their own without any human supervisors.
Companies developing AI agents cannot also charge like the last major genetic change in software, SAAS, charging with use, because if agents work properly, they “take on a whole role,” says Medina.
The customer of an agent does not want to pay for all the distinct duties of an agent – if he knows them even everything, he says. They want to pay for his results, like an employee. Thus, if an agent is hired in insurance and the success of the role is measured in integrated policy renewals, a company does not want to pay for every email sent by the agent.
At the same time, the costs associated with providing factors is variable, depending on how many LLM brands it should perform its training and duties.
“How do you help them invoice for the work they deliver?” Medina said that the newly established companies offering agents. “It took the opportunity to try new things with different customers. They needed the ability to measure their margins. “
The charge meets human resources management
The agents are so young that the newly established businesses should not be involved in procedures that provide a profitable charge, let alone renewals. Payment allows Agentic businesses to create pricing – fixed or variable – with caution in profitable margins.
In this way, it also monitors the production of agents, which also allows the newly formed to validate the return on investment.
It is the Zuora AI Agent Era version (SAAS Refreshing Software) that meets successes (SAAS HR Management Software).
The paid platform is commercially available to start -ups, instead of businesses such as Salesforce and Microsoft, which also offer Agentic platforms. The payment has three such companies as beta customers, says: Logic.App, 11x, Vidlab7, Artisan and Happyrobot.
“Agents replace roles, human roles, not the whole work, but whole roles,” says Medina.
It also ensures what it preaches, using AI to build this new start. Paid engineers coded the original product Demos with tools such as V0, Replit and Lovable.
“This is so fun to build a company right now. We have two engineers and we have created the entire platform of buildings in a month, because we build everything on AI,” he said.
Medina has experience manufacturing companies from nothing. Former Microsoftie, who was a well -known part of the Tech Seattle scene for decades, took the screening of $ 0 when he founded it in 2011 to 800 employees and $ 250 million in annual repetitive revenue since he left CEO’s role in September.
Medina abandoned the role of executive president in March, although it remains on the board. He, and paid, is now a seat in London.
