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Paygentic Secures Funding to Power AI-Driven Payments
San Francisco–based fintech Paygentic, co-founded by Irish entrepreneur Susan O’Neill and Spanish engineer Samuel Alarco Cantos, has raised $2 million in seed funding to accelerate the development of its billing and payments infrastructure for AI-native businesses.
The round was led by MiddleGame Ventures with participation from Anamcara Capital, Aperture, and Angel Invest. The company plans to use the funding to expand its workforce and scale its platform as it moves beyond the stealth stage.
Founded in early 2025, Paygentic aims to provide the monetization backbone for the growing ecosystem of AI-driven products, offering flexible tools for subscription, usage-based, and outcome-based pricing.
A New Fintech Infrastructure for the AI Economy
Paygentic’s founders identified a gap in existing billing systems that struggle to adapt to the unique demands of AI-native and agentic platforms. These businesses rely on dynamic usage metrics and complex pricing models that traditional payment processors are unable to accommodate efficiently.
The company has designed its infrastructure to handle the transactional complexity that comes with machine-led decision-making and high-frequency microtransactions. This model reflects how generative and agentic AI applications are shifting from static product pricing toward adaptive, performance-linked billing.
By building modular APIs for payments, billing, and reconciliation, Paygentic aims to simplify the integration of financial operations into AI systems — a function increasingly central to scaling AI services across industries.
Early Backers and Strategic Investors
The company’s lead investor, MiddleGame Ventures, has been active in early-stage fintech funding across Europe and North America. The firm’s investment in Paygentic signals growing venture interest in financial infrastructure tailored to AI.
Industry analysts note that the funding landscape is now focusing on foundational layers of the AI economy — including payments, identity, and data infrastructure — rather than front-end applications. Paygentic’s approach positions it within that segment, targeting the monetization challenges that AI founders frequently cite as barriers to growth.
Paygentic’s early adoption program has reportedly engaged several pilot customers from the AI software and automation sectors. These partners are testing the platform’s hybrid billing features, designed to handle variable pricing models at enterprise scale.
Founders with Complementary Backgrounds
Co-founder Susan O’Neill, a member of the Fintech Ireland Advisory Council, previously founded Sulu, a Kilkenny-based payment infrastructure provider for AI applications. Her experience in financial systems and regulatory engagement has informed Paygentic’s product design and compliance strategy.
Her co-founder, Samuel Alarco Cantos, brings technical expertise from his tenure at Google, where he worked on distributed systems and API monetization frameworks. His background has been instrumental in building the scalable infrastructure behind Paygentic’s offering.
The founders describe Paygentic as a convergence of their domains — finance and engineering — aimed at enabling AI companies to monetize more effectively without relying on legacy systems.
Positioning Within the Fintech Ecosystem
Paygentic enters the market at a time when AI-native companies are generating more than $15 billion in annualized revenue, according to industry estimates. Many of these firms face operational inefficiencies caused by billing platforms that were not designed for AI workloads.
Fintech investors increasingly view this as a core infrastructure challenge. While traditional payment providers have begun adding automation layers, most still depend on static billing logic. Paygentic’s framework introduces adaptive pricing and billing orchestration as standard features.
By serving AI developers, digital platforms, and enterprise clients, Paygentic’s model fits within the broader evolution of embedded finance, where financial operations become part of core software logic rather than external processes.
A Growing Market for Adaptive Payments
The expansion of AI-driven commerce has accelerated demand for transaction systems that support real-time billing adjustments, transparent reporting, and intelligent pricing. As AI products become more autonomous — from digital agents to self-learning platforms — their economic models require infrastructure that can track value creation dynamically.
Paygentic’s system aims to provide that flexibility. The platform allows developers to automate payment flows tied to product usage, output quality, or customer engagement metrics. This approach could help AI-native firms align revenue with performance in a way that static billing systems cannot.
Analysts view this as part of a larger shift toward outcome-based financial models, where revenue reflects measurable impact rather than flat pricing tiers.
Outlook
Paygentic’s $2 million seed round positions the company to advance its product roadmap and expand its presence in both the United States and Europe. Its focus on AI-native monetization infrastructure addresses a critical gap in the current fintech landscape — one where payment systems are lagging behind the sophistication of the technologies they serve.
As AI companies continue scaling and institutional adoption of agentic systems grows, flexible billing solutions are likely to become essential to digital finance infrastructure. Paygentic’s early momentum suggests that investors see billing and payments for AI as the next frontier in fintech infrastructure.
