AI Startup Paid Raises $21 Million Seed Round

The startup Paid, founded by tech entrepreneur Manny Medina, has raised $21.6 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed. The company is now reported to be valued at more than $100 million.

According to Tech Crunch, the London-based company previously raised €10 million—about $11 million—in a pre-seed round in March. Medina—also the founder of Outreach—came up with the idea for the “results-based billing” service after testing agentic platforms last year.

Paid provides billing infrastructure that introduces a new way of charging for software. The service helps AI agent creators “start charging for points of margin saved by their customers,” Medina explained to TechCrunch.

Medina noted that today’s market is not designed for AI agents and that Paid enables agentic startups to set appropriate pricing while avoiding traditional software models. Since AI agents can perform multiple tasks, Medina argued, both clients and providers should focus less on individual actions and more on measurable outcomes.

“If you’re a quiet agent, you don’t get paid,” said Medina. “You need an infrastructure that allows the agent to charge for the additional work that the agent is doing.”

Paid also tracks outputs and helps companies determine profitable margins. Current clients include startups such as Artisan, HappyRobot, and Logic.app.

“50% of the workforce will be AI agents by 2030,” wrote Medina on the social media platform X on Monday. “While every SaaS company is still stuck charging ‘per seat’ for AI agents that aim to reduce seats. Those two things can’t be true at the same time.”

50% of the workforce will be AI agents by 2030

while every SaaS company is still stuck charging “per seat” for AI agents that aim to reduce seats.

Those two things can’t be true at the same time.

Today we announce $21M in seed funding to fix this! @lightspeedvp knows this… pic.twitter.com/11Q8P38Znx

— Manuel Medina (@medinism) September 29, 2025

The platform itself has been built using the technique known as “vibe coding” with AI agents such as Lovable—which recently announced a new record in Annual Recurring Revenue—, Replit, and v0.

“This is what is so much fun about building a company right now. We have two engineers, and we have built the entirety of the building platform in a month. Why? Because we build everything on AI,” said Medina to TechCrunch.

Sources familiar with the matter confirmed that after this latest funding round, Paid’s valuation has surpassed $100 million.