outcome-based-pricing
(6)
Sierra Charges Only When Its AI Agents Actually Fix Your Problem
Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor built a customer-service company that bills per resolution, not per seat. Two years in, it is worth $15.8 billion and runs support for 40% of the Fortune 50.
Applied Labs
Applied Labs is a New York-based AI company building on-brand, omnichannel AI agents that handle customer support and operational workflows across chat, email, voice, SMS, Slack and social channels. Founded in 2024 by former Scale AI operators Michael Woo and Soham Waychal, the company pairs AI efficiency with human judgment and pitches honest, verifiable resolution metrics over the inflated claims common in the AI support market. Its platform spans AI agents, an AI-native help desk, CRM, voice and analytics, sold on outcome-based pricing rather than per-seat fees.
Paid
Paid is a monetization platform for AI agents. Instead of charging by the seat or the API call, it lets agent builders price by the outcome an agent delivers - points of margin saved, tasks completed, revenue generated - then tracks the underlying costs and margins in real time and hands the customer a receipt proving the value. Founded by Outreach creator Manny Medina and a team that previously built billing at Salesforce, Palantir and Pleo, Paid raised $33.3M across a 2025 pre-seed and seed and is building the plumbing for how software gets paid when the software is an autonomous worker.
Manny Medina
Manny Medina is the co-founder and CEO of Paid, a London-based platform that lets companies bill for AI agents based on the value they deliver instead of per-seat fees. Before Paid he built Outreach, the sales engagement company he grew from a near-dead recruiting marketplace into a business worth $4.4 billion with roughly $250 million in recurring revenue. An Ecuadorian computer engineer who was an early employee on what became AWS and spent six years at Microsoft, Medina is now betting that the seat-based SaaS pricing model is obsolete and that the agent economy needs a way to get paid.
Anda Gansca
Anda Gansca is the co-founder and CEO of Knotch, the New York content intelligence company she started in 2012 after talking her way out of Transylvania and into Stanford. She built Knotch to tell brands which of their content actually works, then bet the whole company on AI: scrapping a rejected analytics product and relaunching in 2025 as AgentC, an AI-staffed marketing agency that only charges clients when results show up. A Forbes and Inc 30 Under 30 honoree, she raised roughly $48-50M and counts Zillow, Realtor.com, Chime and Zoom among AgentC's early testers.
Distyl AI
Distyl AI is a San Francisco enterprise-AI company that rebuilds Fortune 500 operating models around frontier models. Founded by Palantir alumni Arjun Prakash and Derek Ho, it pairs a proprietary platform called Distillery with embedded forward-deployed teams to put production AI in front of more than 120 million end users. In September 2025 it closed a $175M Series B at a $1.8B valuation.