Billing infrastructure has been a vexing concern for generations of software program and Web corporations. It’s mission essential infrastructure and as such, seems like an issue that ought to have been bought a very long time in the past. But ask any firm and also you’ll typically get the identical reply: they’re dissatisfied with their billing system, which doesn’t supply the extent of flexibility to handle their particular wants and the various edge circumstances that inevitably pop up.
The issue is simply getting worse because the software program business transitions from subscription-based to consumption-based income fashions. What began as a trickle is turning into mainstream, as utilization based mostly pricing unquestionably builds higher alignment with clients. This transition will solely be accelerating, as a whole era of recent AI corporations coming on-line which are nearly all utilizing that pricing mannequin.
As we speak, we’re excited to introduced our Collection A funding in Lago, the main open supply metering and usage-based billing firm. Lago gives each a self-hosted and cloud, scalable and modular structure
Our funding thesis is fairly easy:
- Utilization-based native: Lago is natively targeted on the particular downside of usage-based billing and as such, extremely effectively positioned to be the default resolution for a complete new era of corporations, together with specifically AI corporations – it’s not accident that clients already embrace AI unicorns like Mistral and Collectively AI
- Open supply: aside from the truth that we love open supply infra typically (as evidenced by our investments in Cockroach Labs, ClickHouse, Astronomer, SurrealDB, Quickwit, and so on), open supply is a very formidable benefit for the billing house typically, because it allows a stage of extensibility and composability that’s uniquely suited to the various edge circumstances that inevitably pop up
- Europe/US: Lago is a type of bi-continental corporations we love at FirstMark, with product and tech based mostly within the vibrant Paris tech ecosystem and GTM, over time, within the US. Notably as its ambitions transcend “simply” billing, Lago will probably be constructing an amazing quantity of product over the following few years, and will probably be effectively served by the relative value benefit {that a} European location gives.
- Workforce: Evidently, firstly we love the Lago staff, led by co-founders Anh-Tho and Raffi, each extremely considerate and gritty. The Lago staff comes from a spot of deep business information, having constructed the whole billing infrastructure at fintech unicorn Qonto.
- Bonus: getting to listen to my colleague Aman repeat “open supply metering and usage-based billing”, an space he’s significantly captivated with, hundreds of instances with equal enthusiasm
We very a lot stay up for working with Lago, and we’re excited to hitch a terrific group of prior traders together with our buddies at New Wave, SignalFire and a number of the “French AI mafia” like Clement Delangue from Hugging Face and Romain Huet from OpenAI.
In fact, Lago is hiring.
