San Francisco-based fintech Paygentic, co-founded by Irish entrepreneurs Susan O’Neill and Samuel Alarco Cantos, has emerged from stealth with a $2 million pre-seed funding round. The fresh capital, led by MiddleGame Ventures, is earmarked to expand its team and accelerate product development for its specialized billing and payments platform designed for the burgeoning AI-native and agentic product market.
In an era where AI applications are rapidly evolving beyond traditional software, their monetization models often struggle to keep pace. Legacy billing systems, built for simpler subscription or fixed-usage paradigms, are proving inadequate for the complex, dynamic nature of agentic AI. Paygentic aims to bridge this gap, offering infrastructure that allows AI businesses to monetize platforms using hybrid, usage-based, and even outcome-based models.
"We built Paygentic because we saw first-hand that traditional billing solutions break the moment things get complex," said co-founder Susan O’Neill, a member of the Fintech Ireland advisory council and former founder of AI payment infrastructure provider Sulu. "AI founders lack the flexible infrastructure needed to price and monetize their products effectively." This sentiment underscores a growing pain point for developers pushing the boundaries of AI.
The Agentic Economy's New Financial Backbone
The "agentic economy" refers to a future where autonomous AI agents perform tasks and generate value, requiring granular, real-time, and often outcome-dependent billing. Paygentic's platform is purpose-built for this, tracking any metric and converting it into revenue without the rigid structures of older systems. This flexibility is critical for AI products that might charge per API call, per successful task completion, or even based on the value generated by an AI agent.
Kanishk Walia, a partner at MiddleGame Ventures, echoed this vision, stating, "AI-native products are redefining how value is created and delivered, yet legacy billing and payments systems can’t keep up with this complexity. At MiddleGame Ventures, we see Paygentic as foundational infrastructure for the agentic AI economy." The investment signals a clear belief that the future of AI monetization demands a dedicated, adaptable solution, moving beyond the limitations of general-purpose payment processors. With this Paygentic funding, the company is poised to become a key enabler for the next wave of AI innovation.