Manny Medina's New Venture: Enabling AI Agents to Earn Income

# ai agent # outreach

As the era of AI agents unfolds, a new trend is gaining traction: startups are emerging to provide the essential tools that help businesses create and manage a workforce of bots. Manny Medina, renowned for founding and formerly leading Outreach, a sales automation company valued at $4.4 billion, has just launched a startup named Paid, as he exclusively shared with TechCrunch. Paid isn't about creating AI agents; instead, it offers a platform designed to ensure these agents are paid profitably. On Monday, Paid announced it had secured €10 million (roughly $11 million) in pre-seed funding from major investors including EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund. The concept for Paid was born after Medina spent months conversing with numerous startups in the agentic platform space. A recurring issue he identified was their uncertainty about pricing models. “They didn’t really know what to charge,” Medina explained to TechCrunch. The challenge with AI agents is that traditional software pricing models don't apply. Charging per user or per seat, as seen with products like Microsoft Office, isn't feasible when a single employee can manage multiple agents, or when agents operate autonomously. Similarly, the subscription-based models of SaaS don't fit because, as Medina points out, effective agents take over entire roles, not just individual tasks. Customers aren't interested in paying for each action an agent performs, especially if they're unaware of all the tasks involved. Instead, they want to pay based on the results the agent delivers, similar to how they would compensate an employee. For example, in an insurance context, customers care about completed policy renewals, not the number of emails sent. Moreover, the costs of running AI agents fluctuate based on the number of LLM tokens required for training and execution. This variability complicates pricing for agentic startups. Medina's solution with Paid is to help these startups set pricing models—either fixed or variable—that maintain profitable margins. Paid also tracks agent performance, helping startups measure their return on investment. In essence, Paid combines elements of billing and HR management, akin to a blend of Zuora (known for SaaS renewal billing) and SuccessFactors (known for SaaS HR management). Paid targets startups rather than large enterprises like Salesforce and Microsoft, which are also venturing into agentic platforms. Currently, Paid boasts beta customers such as Logic.app, 11x, VidLab7, Artisan, and HappyRobot. “Agents are replacing roles, human roles, not the entire job, but entire roles,” Medina emphasizes. Medina is also applying AI to build Paid, leveraging tools like v0, Replit, and Lovable for initial product demos. “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,” he shared enthusiastically. With a track record of growing Outreach from zero to 800 employees and $250 million in annual recurring revenue by the time he stepped down as CEO in September, Medina knows a thing or two about scaling startups. He left his executive chairman role at Outreach in March but remains on the board. Medina and Paid are now based in London.

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