Billing infrastructure has been a vexing problem for generations of software program and Web firms. It’s mission essential infrastructure and as such, appears like an issue that ought to have been bought a very long time in the past. But ask any firm and also you’ll usually get the identical reply: they’re dissatisfied with their billing system, which doesn’t supply the extent of flexibility to deal with their particular wants and the numerous edge circumstances that inevitably pop up.
The issue is just getting worse because the software program business transitions from subscription-based to consumption-based income fashions. What began as a trickle is changing into mainstream, as utilization primarily based pricing unquestionably builds higher alignment with clients. This transition will solely be accelerating, as a whole technology of latest AI firms coming on-line which are nearly all utilizing that pricing mannequin.
At present, 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, and located robust product market match each as an open supply mission and a industrial product.
Our funding thesis is fairly easy:
- Utilization-based native: Lago is natively targeted on the precise downside of usage-based billing and as such, extremely effectively positioned to be the default answer for a complete new technology of firms, together with particularly AI firms – 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 many others), open supply is a very formidable benefit for the billing house typically, because it permits a stage of extensibility and composability that’s uniquely suited to edge circumstances. Lago is a natively open supply firm with robust OSS traction and a vibrant neighborhood
- Europe/US: Lago is a kind of bi-continental firms we love at FirstMark, with product and tech primarily based within the vibrant Paris tech ecosystem and GTM, over time, within the US. Notably as its ambitions transcend “simply” billing, Lago might be constructing an incredible quantity of product over the subsequent few years, and might be effectively served by the relative price benefit {that a} European location gives.
- Workforce: Evidently, at first we love the Lago group, led by co-founders Anh-Tho and Raffi, each extremely considerate and gritty. The Lago group comes from a spot of deep business data, 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 notably obsessed with, 1000’s of instances with equal enthusiasm
We very a lot look ahead to working with Lago, and we’re excited to affix an incredible group of prior traders together with our associates at New Wave, SignalFire and among the “French AI mafia” like Clement Delangue from Hugging Face and Romain Huet from OpenAI.
After all, Lago is hiring.
