Paid raised $21 million in a seed round to expand its mission to include helping software-as-a-service companies pivot to selling artificial intelligence (AI) agents.
This move extends Paid’s original mission of helping builders get paid for their agents, the company said in a Sunday (Sept. 28) blog post.
Public SaaS companies are seeing their growth slow and their core business model break down because seat counts are dropping as AI agents replace entire teams and customers refuse to pay “per seat” for software that eliminates seats, Paid Co-Founder Arnon Shimoni said in the post.
“The route is clear, and smart SaaS companies are already selling AI agents,” Shimoni said in the post. “Early movers are seeing 20-40% revenue increases within 6 months, higher retention rates and much faster sales cycles.”
For SaaS companies that haven’t made that transition, Paid provides an infrastructure layer that helps by handling customer value proofs, custom pricing, outcome- and value-based pricing that replaces seats, true cost tracking for each agent, and AI business intelligence, according to the post.
“The SaaS industry is at the biggest inflection point since on-prem to cloud,” Shimoni said in the post. “Companies that make the transition to AI agent business models in the next 12 months will dominate their categories. Those that don’t will get left behind.”
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Paid’s seed round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to the release.
Alexander Schmitt, partner at Lightspeed, said in a Sunday blog post that the impact and cost of AI agents cannot be accurately measured with current tools and that this opacity threatens to stall the AI agent revolution.
“AI agents, who promise to be autonomous digital workers, require rebuilding the entire economic framework for how we price, track and monetize digital labor from the ground up,” Schmitt said. “Traditional SaaS pricing models simply don’t work for AI agents.”
Paid’s solution has helped current customers capture fair value in comparison to the performance of their AI agents and accelerate their deployment of AI agents, Schmitt said in the post.
Paid announced its launch in March, at which time it had raised about $10.8 million to scale its financial infrastructure that helps the builders of AI agents get paid.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/