Alvaro
Morales.

At Asana, Alvaro Morales kept running into the same wall. The company wanted to change its pricing - add a feature to a tier, adjust a plan, try a new packaging idea. Everyone agreed it was a good idea. The engineering was not the hard part. And yet, again and again, a change that felt like it should take an afternoon turned into a project that dragged on for months, snarled inside a legacy billing system that treated pricing as something rigid and permanent.

He found it maddening. As a developer, he had access to fast, flexible, beautifully designed tools for almost everything. Billing was the exception - inflexible, far removed from the product, and built around accounting constructs instead of real usage. "We found it super counterintuitive that legacy billing tools didn't make it easy to evolve pricing," he later said. So in 2021, he and his Asana colleague Kshitij Grover left to build the thing they wished they had.

That thing is Orb. It starts by ingesting raw product usage - the events, the tokens, the API calls, the seats - and lets a company define whatever pricing logic it wants on top of that data. Subscriptions, usage-based meters, hybrid contracts, outcome-based charges: all of it lives in one place, close to the product, ready to be changed without a quarter-long engineering slog. The pitch fits on a sticker: ship pricing as fast as you ship product.

Morales grew up in Lima, Peru, and left for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a computer science degree between 2011 and 2015. He collected the kind of internships that read like a Silicon Valley starter kit before he had even graduated - a software engineering stint at Yahoo the summer of 2013, a forward-deployed engineering role at Palantir the summer of 2014. Then came Asana, where he spent roughly five years leading growth engineering and core product teams straight through the company's direct listing. It was a front-row seat to the machinery of how software companies grow, and to the specific, recurring pain of how they charge.

The insight he carried out of that experience is deceptively simple: pricing is not a finance chore bolted onto a product. It is part of the product. How you charge shapes how customers experience what you build. Treat it as an afterthought and you leave money, trust and momentum on the table. Treat it as a first-class discipline and you can experiment your way to something better. Orb exists to make that experimentation cheap and safe.

The AI-era hall of fame

The customer roster is a tell. The companies with the gnarliest, most usage-heavy business models - the ones charging by the token, the compute-second, the deploy - are exactly the ones that gravitated to Orb.

"We've found a particularly strong fit in AI, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and dev tools," Morales has said - the corners of software where a customer's bill is a moving target, recalculated from mountains of raw usage data. Metering that accurately, in real time, is genuinely hard. It is also exactly the problem AI pricing has made urgent, as companies scramble to charge for tokens, agents and outcomes rather than tidy monthly seats.

The money followed the thesis. A $5.1 million seed round led by Greylock in 2021. A $19.1 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures in 2023. A $25 million Series B led by Mayfield in 2024, arriving as Orb's revenue grew roughly fivefold and its customer base tripled in a single year. Around $49 million in all, from a who's-who of investors betting that billing was ripe for a rebuild.

Then came the exit. In June 2026, the Dutch payments giant Adyen announced a definitive agreement to acquire Orb for $335 million in an all-cash deal, folding the billing engine into its enterprise stack to unify billing and payments. Orb would run as a subsidiary under an incubator model, and its founders agreed to reinvest a meaningful chunk of their proceeds into Adyen shares - a sign they intend to keep building, not cash out and disappear.

For Morales, the harder transition may have been a quieter one. He has spoken openly about how difficult it was to "take off his engineer hat" and make room for a founder's mindset - to stop being the person who solves the problem and become the person who builds the team and the company that solves it. Orb's internal value is a two-word reminder of where he came from: minutes matter. It is a philosophy about billing. It is also, clearly, a philosophy about how he likes to work.

What he seems to want, in the end, is to abolish an invisible tax. Every hour an engineer spends wrestling a billing system into submission is an hour not spent on the actual product. Morales built a company to take that hour back - and, along the way, to make the deeply unglamorous business of invoices feel a little like software again.