Paygentic, a London-based startup building payments infrastructure for AI-native and agent-driven businesses, has raised $2 million (£1.6m) in pre-seed funding to expand its team and accelerate product development.
The funding round was led by MiddleGame Ventures, with participation from Anamcara Capital, Aperture, Angel Invest, and Alan Morgan, chairman at Adfisco.
Founded by Susan O’Neill and Samuel Alarco Cantos (pictured), Paygentic is tackling a fast-emerging issue in the AI software sector — the mismatch between variable compute costs and traditional fixed SaaS billing models.
While AI-native firms face highly fluctuating usage costs driven by model inference and API consumption, most lack billing systems that can scale dynamically with performance, usage or outcomes. Paygentic’s all-in-one platform enables AI companies to introduce hybrid, usage-based, and outcome-based pricing models, offering greater flexibility and control over monetisation.
The company’s launch comes as AI-native startups collectively surpass $15 billion in annualised revenue, creating fresh demand for specialised financial infrastructure that can support complex, machine-driven transactions.
Co-founder and CEO Susan O’Neill said Paygentic was born out of frustration with rigid legacy systems: “We built Paygentic because traditional billing solutions break the moment things get complex. AI founders lack the flexible infrastructure needed to price and monetise their products effectively. Our platform lets AI companies charge for what actually matters — and scale as fast as they innovate.”
Kanishk Walia, Partner at MiddleGame Ventures, said the firm sees Paygentic as “foundational infrastructure for the agentic AI economy.”
“AI-native products are redefining how value is created and delivered, yet legacy billing and payments systems can’t keep up. Paygentic has built an agent-first stack that makes it possible to monetise usage, outcomes and hybrid models at scale — exactly what this new generation of businesses requires.”
Paygentic’s platform converts AI agent actions — from prompts to outcomes — directly into billable events, integrating billing, payments, and pricing logic in one system. Designed for developers and product teams, it aims to remove friction between experimentation, pricing, and revenue recognition.
Operating in stealth mode since early 2025, Paygentic has already onboarded a select group of early adopters, including ChaseLabs, which provides AI-powered Sales Development Representatives (SDRs).
Ed Gibbins, Co-founder of ChaseLabs, said: “Our business depends on outcome-based pricing — we get paid if our AI SDR generates a lead. Traditional billing systems couldn’t handle that, but Paygentic understood exactly what we needed.”
With its platform now publicly available, Paygentic plans to expand access to AI developers, LLM infrastructure providers, and agentic frameworks, enabling them to launch, monetise, and scale their products faster.
As the AI-native economy matures, Paygentic aims to position itself at the intersection of fintech and intelligent automation, building what investors describe as “the financial plumbing for the agentic era.”
