Outreach founder Manny Medina has a new startup that helps AI agents get paid

As the year of the AI agent takes shape, a new trend is emerging: startups offering the picks and shovels that help employers build a workforce of bots. Manny Medina, best known as the founder and former CEO of the $4.4 billion valued sales automation company Outreach, just launched one such startup called Paid, he told TechCrunch exclusively. Paid doesn’t make AI agents. It offers a platform that makes sure they get paid, profitably. Paid announced Monday that it raised €10 million (about $11 million) in a pre-seed investment from European powerhouse EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund. Medina came up with the idea for Paid after spending months talking to dozens of agentic platform startups. In these conversations, a common complaint emerged. “They didn’t really know what to charge,” Medina told TechCrunch. The premise of Paid is that the old ways of charging for software won’t work with AI agents. Agentic companies can’t charge per user or per seat, meaning based on how many pe ... Read full article.