Manny Medina, the entrepreneur behind Outreach — a sales automation platform valued at $4.4 billion — has secured fresh investor backing for his new venture, Paid. The London-based startup has raised $21.6 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by Lightspeed, pushing its total funding to $33.3 million, following an earlier €10 million pre-seed round in March. Sources close to the deal reveal that the company’s valuation has already surpassed $100 million.

Unlike most players in the AI space, Paid does not create agents itself. Instead, it provides the infrastructure that enables agent developers to bill clients based on tangible results delivered by their AI systems — a concept Medina calls “results-based billing.” This model offers an alternative to traditional pricing methods such as per-user fees or unlimited-use subscriptions, both of which pose challenges for agent providers who must cover costly model and cloud usage fees.

“Agent providers need to demonstrate the real value their solutions bring,” Medina explained. “If an agent is working quietly in the background, scaling up workloads without being noticed, there must be a system in place to ensure it gets paid accordingly.”

This approach resonates with SaaS companies and early adopters like Artisan, a fast-growing sales automation firm, and ERP vendor IFS, which recently joined Paid’s customer base. By helping businesses link AI-driven tasks directly to measurable outcomes, Paid aims to tackle a major challenge in enterprise AI: the gap between pilot projects and real-world value.

A recent MIT study highlighted that only 5% of enterprise AI projects ever make it into production, with 95% delivering no measurable value. Lightspeed’s Alexander Schmitt, whose firm has invested over $2.5 billion into AI infrastructure and applications in the past three years, sees Paid as a potential breakthrough. “The core problem is that no one can really attach value to what agents are doing today,” Schmitt said. “Paid’s model is something we haven’t seen before.”

The seed round also saw participation from new investor FUSE and existing backer EQT Ventures. As AI adoption accelerates, Medina’s startup is positioning itself to ensure that AI agents are not only deployed but also compensated based on real impact, potentially reshaping how businesses evaluate and pay for artificial intelligence.

Source: Techcrunch