Metronomes have been keeping time for hundreds of years, rhythmically clicking back and forth at exact intervals. A metronome is steady, and a tool that’s long been used by dancers, musicians, and athletes to build precision in timing. That association is what gave usage-based billing startup Metronome its name.
"We wanted a name that felt like ‘you can depend on us,’” said Scott Woody, Metronome cofounder and CEO. “Something that’s super reliable, that no matter what happens in your business, Metronome is there to keep you going.”
Metronome has raised a $50 million Series C, led by NEA, Fortune can exclusively report. The round included Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Workday Ventures, Greyhound Capital, Truebridge Capital Partners, Activant Capital, SineWave Ventures, and Megalith Ventures. This round brings the company’s total capital raised to $128 million. (The company declined to disclose valuation.)
Fittingly, timing has been a theme throughout Metronome’s arc. The company was founded in 2019—a moment when usage-based billing was far from hot.
“We were second-time entrepreneurs, I had a solid background working at Dropbox in engineering, and it was still hard to raise money,” said Woody. “And everyone was very clear about why they were saying no—that ‘usage-based billing wasn’t a thing.’ There were very few companies that had it, like AWS or Snowflake at the time, but it was very, very niche.”
The AI boom has completely changed that, taking usage-based billing from niche to essential for some of the buzziest companies in the world. Metronome has accordingly been in a surge throughout the AI boom: Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks are among the startup’s customers, the company says. (There’s a growing list of competitors riding this wave, too, like Stripe Billing.)
"The market opportunity for Metronome is abundant as providers of AI and infrastructure software are prioritizing the alignment of value for their solutions," said Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, NEA venture partner, via email. "Every technology revolution is accompanied by a business model change and Metronome provides the 'picks and shovels' to support that change."
The AI wave is also building on the cloud wave, Woody told Fortune.
“But the AI boom has really accelerated the application layer becoming more usage-based. Think about ChatGPT as an application,” said Woody. “It’s $200 a month or $20 a month, depending on which version you have, but those subscriptions also have usage limits baked into them."
There’s no one-size-fits all approach to billing, which is part of the challenge and the opportunity, which Woody realized back when he was first putting Metronome together.
"I literally have this spreadsheet of 50 different companies,” he said. “And what we realized was that actually, all these companies actually do bill the same. They have clusters of business models that are all the same, but they have tiny tweaks on top of them. So the way I like to think about it is they all use the same Legos, but they paint the Legos different colors."
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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