Meet Manny Medina’s Game-Changing Startup: Empowering AI Agents to Earn with Innovative Solutions

As the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) evolves, a significant trend is emerging: startups are developing essential tools that enable companies to create a workforce of AI agents. One such startup, Paid, founded by Manny Medina, aims to revolutionize how businesses manage the financial aspects of employing AI agents. Recently, Paid announced a successful pre-seed funding round, raising €10 million (approximately $11 million) to enhance its platform.

The Vision Behind Paid

Manny Medina, renowned for founding the sales automation company Outreach, conceived the idea for Paid after engaging with numerous startups focused on agentic platforms. Through these discussions, a recurring challenge surfaced: many startups struggled to determine effective pricing models for their AI agents.

Revolutionizing Pricing Models

Traditional pricing structures, such as charging per user or per seat, are inadequate for AI agents. As Medina notes, one employee can oversee multiple agents, and in some cases, agents function autonomously without human supervision. Therefore, businesses cannot implement conventional SaaS pricing based on usage alone.

• Agents Take Over Roles: AI agents are designed to assume entire roles, not just perform discrete tasks. For instance, in insurance, a company’s success relies on completed policy renewals rather than the individual emails sent by an agent.
• Variable Costs: The costs of deploying AI agents fluctuate, depending on the number of large language model (LLM) tokens required for their training and tasks.

Bridging Billing and HR Management

Given the nascent stage of AI agents, many startups are yet to establish effective billing processes that ensure profitability. Paid addresses this gap by allowing companies to create both fixed and variable pricing, ensuring they maintain profitable margins.

This innovative platform not only facilitates pricing strategies but also tracks agent performance, enabling startups to validate their return on investment (ROI).

A Unique Offering in the Market

Paid positions itself uniquely in the market, targeting startups rather than large enterprises like Salesforce and Microsoft. Currently, the platform is in beta with several companies, including:

• Logic.app
• 11x
• VidLab7
• Artisan
• HappyRobot

Medina emphasizes, “Agents are replacing specific human roles, not entire jobs, but rather the functions within those jobs.”

Leveraging AI in Development

Demonstrating the principles of his company, Medina has utilized AI tools to create the initial product demos for Paid. The development team, consisting of just two engineers, managed to build the platform in a remarkably short time, leveraging AI technologies.

“This is what makes building a company exciting right now. With AI, we have developed the entire platform in a month,” Medina shared.

Medina’s Track Record

With a strong background in building successful companies, Medina previously grew Outreach from inception to a valuation of $4.4 billion, boasting 800 employees and $250 million in annual recurring revenue by the time he stepped down as CEO.

Although he left his executive chairman role in March, he continues to serve on the board while establishing Paid, which is currently based in London.

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