With the year AI agents take shape, new trends are emerging: startups that offer picks that can help employers build the workforce of robots.
He specifically told TechCrunch that Manny Medina, the founder and former CEO of Outreach, a $4.4 billion sales automation company, has just launched a startup called Pay.
Paying will not become an AI agent. It provides a platform to ensure they make a profit. Paid announced on Monday that it is from European power plants EQT Ventures, Sequoia and GTMFUND.
Medina has spent months talking to dozens of broker platform startups and came up with the idea of paying. Amid these conversations, a general complaint emerged. “They really don’t know what to charge for,” Medina told TechCrunch.
The prerequisite for payment is that the old software charging method cannot be used with the AI agent. Agents cannot charge per user or per seat, which means it depends on the person using the software (such as Microsoft Office). The point is that one employee can run many agents. Otherwise the agent will themselves have no human supervisor.
Medina said companies that develop AI agents can’t charge the same way they use software, SaaS’s last generation, because if agents work properly, they’re “taking over the entire role.”
He said the agent’s customers don’t want to pay for all the discrete tasks the agent does – if it even knows them all. They want to pay for the results like employees. Therefore, if the agent is employed in the insurance and the success of that role is measured in the completed policy renewal, the company does not want to pay for every email sent by the agent.
At the same time, the costs associated with providing the agent are variable depending on the number of LLM tokens required to perform the training and tasks.
“So, how do you help them price the jobs they offer?” Medina said of startups that offer agents. “They need to be able to try new things with different customers. They need to be able to measure their profit margins.”
Billing complies with human resources management
Agents are so new that startups don’t have to deal with the process of providing profitable billing, let alone updates. Paid allows agent startups to create pricing (fixed or variables) and focus on profit margins.
In the process, it also tracks the output of the agent, which also allows startups to validate the ROI.
This is the AI Agent ERA version of Zuora (SaaS update billing software) that complies with SuccessFactors (SaaS HR management software).
Paid platforms are being marketed to startups, rather than businesses like Salesforce and Microsoft, which also offer proxy platforms. Paying has three Beta customers and other companies, it says: Logic.App, 11 times, Vidlab7, Artisan and HappyRobot.
“Agents are taking over roles, human roles, not the whole work, but the whole role,” Medina said.
He is also practicing his preaching and using AI to build the new startup. Paid engineer Vibe encoded the initial product demonstration using tools such as V0, Replit, and lodable.
“It’s the fun of building a company. We have two engineers and we’ve built the entire building platform in a month. Why? Because we built everything on AI.”
Medina gained nothing. The former Microsoftie has been a well-known part of Seattle’s tech world for decades, when he founded in 2011 with $0 to 800 employees and $250 million in annual recurring revenue, when he left the CEO in September.
Medina left the role of executive chairman in March, although he was still on the board. He and the Grid are now based in London.
