The billing platform that starts with what your customers actually did - and turns it into revenue.
Above: the orb wordmark, lowercase and unbothered. Look closely at the “r” - it’s shaped like an Allen wrench, because building flexible pricing was always the whole point.
Somewhere right now, a developer at an AI company ships a feature that charges by the token. A second later, a customer burns through 4,812 of those tokens. Somebody has to count them, price them, invoice them, and recognize the revenue without a finance team filing a ticket. That somebody is Orb - and most of the time, nobody notices it's there. Which is exactly the point.
Orb is a billing platform, a phrase that has historically been the conversational equivalent of a sleeping pill. But the company sits at a strange and suddenly interesting intersection: software stopped being sold by the seat and started being sold by the unit of work. Tokens. API calls. Compute. Outcomes. The old way of charging - a flat monthly subscription decided in a boardroom - simply doesn't survive contact with a product that costs something different every time you use it.
Traditional billing tools are far removed from the product, centered around constructs like a “subscription.” Orb starts with ingesting raw product usage, and lets users define any pricing logic on top of that.
A “simple” price change that takes six months
Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover met as engineers at Asana and stayed through its IPO. Along the way they kept drawing the same short straw: the pricing change. On paper, a quick tweak. In practice, a cross-functional expedition involving engineering, finance, data, and a great deal of patience. A change that should have taken a sprint took a quarter or two. The product team could ship a feature in days; the team trying to charge for it needed months.
This is the small, unglamorous injustice that Orb exists to fix. Pricing, it turns out, is not a spreadsheet exercise bolted on at the end. It's a product surface - arguably the most honest one a company has, because it's the moment a customer decides what your work is worth.
Pricing is about as customer-centric and product-centric as you get.
Build billing the way engineers wish it worked
The bet was contrarian in the most boring-sounding way possible: that billing - the thing every founder treats as a solved problem until it isn't - was actually broken at the foundation. Legacy systems modeled the world as subscriptions and contracts. Orb decided to model it as raw usage events, and let every pricing rule live as logic on top of that stream of data. Flip the order of operations, and suddenly usage-based, seat-based, token-based, tiered, and hybrid pricing are all just configurations of the same engine.
In 2021 they raised a $5.1M seed from Greylock. It was, in retrospect, a wager that the entire software industry was about to need exactly this. The AI wave hadn't crested yet. When it did, it brought with it the most usage-based pricing the industry had ever seen - and a sudden, urgent demand for infrastructure that could count it all.
One engine, every pricing model you can dream up
What Orb actually does is deceptively plain to describe and devilish to build. It ingests raw product usage at scale, applies whatever pricing logic a company defines, and turns the result into invoices, payments, revenue recognition, and the audit trail finance teams need to sleep at night. Engineering meters; finance reconciles; Orb sits in the middle so neither side has to negotiate with the other.
Ingests usage events and applies any pricing logic - usage-based, seat-based, token-based, tiered, or hybrid - without re-engineering.
Automated invoicing and payment workflows that stay in sync with real-time usage instead of a stale monthly snapshot.
Revenue recognition, audit trails, and reporting built for the people who actually answer to auditors.
Model and simulate new pricing, set spend controls and thresholds, and evolve plans without breaking what already works.
I want Orb to be known for enabling companies to ship their pricing as quickly as they’ve shipped their products.
Customers, numbers, and the investors who noticed
The customer list reads like a who's-who of the new AI economy: Vercel, Replit, Pinecone, and Perplexity all run their billing on Orb. These are companies whose costs and prices move with usage by design - the exact buyers who feel the old way's failures most acutely.
Total raised: roughly $44M, backed by Mayfield, Menlo Ventures, Greylock, South Park Commons, Basecase, Scribble Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures.
With the rise of GenAI, we’re moving towards granular usage-based and outcome-based pricing.
Billing, built with a developer's lens
Orb's stated mission is to transform billing for every software company by building infrastructure with a developer lens - bringing usage data and pricing together in one place. It's a modest sentence hiding an ambitious idea: that the way money flows through software should be as flexible, testable, and fast-moving as the software itself.
The competition is not asleep - Stripe Billing, Metronome, Lago, Chargebee, and the eternal rival, the homegrown billing system someone built in a weekend and now everyone is afraid to touch. Orb's wager is that the homegrown system is the real enemy, and that most teams would rather not run the meter themselves.
When everything is metered, the meter matters
Software is drifting, fast, toward charging for outcomes rather than access. An AI agent that completes a task, a model that answers a query, a workflow that ships a result - each is a billable event waiting for someone to count it correctly. The companies building that future have a choice: spend their best engineers reinventing billing, or hand the meter to someone who treats it as a product.
So return to that developer who shipped a token-priced feature at the top of this story. The customer burns 4,812 tokens. The invoice is right. The revenue is recognized. The finance team never filed a ticket, and the engineer never opened the billing code. Orb did its job by being invisible. In a world where everything is suddenly metered, being the meter nobody thinks about turns out to be a remarkably good place to stand.