Imagine an AI handling customer service tasks, such as managing 1,000 support tickets per month, thereby saving a business $50,000 in labor costs. Despite this impressive efficiency, the developers behind the AI face a major challenge. They are unable to demonstrate the financial benefits to the clients effectively and are stuck charging a fixed fee of $500 per month. This is not representative of the AI’s actual economic output. This gap between AI-generated value and the revenue captured by its creators is putting a $19.9 trillion economic opportunity by 2030 at risk.
Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Paid, the company seeking to build the missing economic infrastructure for AI agents, as we lead their $21 million seed round.
Why AI Agents Break Traditional Software Economics
We are witnessing the most significant transformation of work since the Industrial Revolution. AI agents are projected to contribute up to 7% in increased global GDP by 2030. Yet early in this adoption cycle, we see the “Gen AI Paradox”: 95% of AI pilots fail to get pushed into production. That’s because, in our view, the core issue is economic visibility — impact and cost cannot be accurately measured with current tools.
This opacity results in a critical infrastructure gap that threatens to stall the AI agent revolution just as it reaches its inflection point. Manny Medina, Paid’s CEO and Co-Founder, discusses this gap on his podcast here.
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. Traditional SaaS pricing models simply don’t work for AI agents.
These agents consume computing resources dynamically, operate around the clock, and deliver business outcomes that vary wildly based on the complexity of work performed. A sales AI agent might generate $10,000 in pipeline one week and $100,000 the next, yet most companies can only charge the same monthly fee regardless.
The result? AI agent builders consistently undercharge for high-value work while customers question what they’re paying for. Companies like Artisan and Boon were seeing strong AI agent performance but struggling to capture fair value until they implemented Paid’s platform. Now they’re seeing 20-40% revenue increases with the same underlying technology.
Paid works closely with IFS, whose AI solution helps industrial companies to maintain assets, manage service operations, or manufacture and distribute goods — last valued at $15B. Mark Moffat, CEO of IFS, shares: “Paid is an instrumental element in how we are scaling our AI Agent platform offering to our partners and customers. With Paid, we are able to bring agentic AI solutions into Industrial verticals at an accelerated pace.”
Paid is Building the Missing Infrastructure Layer Application Builders in the Age of AI
This is precisely why we believe Paid has built something essential: the first comprehensive business system purpose-built for the economics of AI agent work. The platform provides five critical capabilities:
Customer Value Proof: Branded portals that show customers exactly what their AI agents are accomplishing and the ROI they’re generating. Making invisible AI work a tangible business outcome.
Custom Pricing, Fast: Deploy per-customer pricing in minutes, aligned to the value customers are looking for.
Outcome-Based & Hybrid Models: Replace seat-based pricing with AI-native pricing models to enable revenue sharing and success-based models.
Cost Tracking: Real-time telemetry that tracks exact costs for every agent action, customer interaction, and workflow execution.
AI Business Intelligence: Team-wide dashboards providing visibility into agent performance, customer profitability, and actionable optimization insights.
This investment also reflects our broader conviction about where AI value creation is heading: the next wave of AI value will come from infrastructure that operationalizes AI deployment at scale and application companies that harness the value created.
The Category-Defining Founder Behind the Solution
What gives us exceptional confidence is the founder tackling this problem, Manny Medina, who previously built Outreach, an established sales engagement platform. Before Outreach, sales teams were flying blind on prospect engagement, unable to systematically track what worked across their outreach efforts. Manny built the infrastructure that transformed chaotic sales processes into measurable, optimizable systems.
Now he’s applying that same category-defining vision to AI agents. We believe Paid is positioned to become essential infrastructure for AI agents by solving the pricing and value demonstration problem. Manny shares, “Our mission is to grow the AI agent economy by solving these fundamental infrastructure gaps. Paid is your partner for the age of agents.”
At Lightspeed, we’re proud to partner with Manny and the entire Paid team as they build the business engine for the AI agent revolution.
The future of work isn’t just about AI that can think. It’s about AI that businesses can successfully deploy, scale, and monetize. Make sure to follow Manny and his thoughts on how agents evolve in his podcast and join Paid.ai on their journey as a team member!
The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. The views expressed here are those of the individual Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. (“Lightspeed”) personnel and are not the views of Lightspeed or its affiliates; other market participants could take different views.
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