Salesforce buys m3ter to add usage-based billing to Agentforce
▼ Summary
– Salesforce is acquiring m3ter, a London-based metering platform, to integrate consumption-based billing natively into Agentforce Revenue Management, with financial terms undisclosed.
– The acquisition addresses a shift from per-seat subscriptions to usage-based pricing, as AI agents that replace human workers create billing challenges.
– m3ter was founded in 2020 by Griffin Parry and John Griffin, who previously built usage-based billing at AWS, and raised $31.5 million in total funding.
– m3ter ingests product usage data in near real time, applies pricing rules, and outputs charges to CRM or billing systems, serving customers like Paddle and Onfido.
– The deal is part of Salesforce’s strategy to assemble a complete AI agent platform, including acquisitions of Informatica, Contentful, and others, with the transaction expected to close in Q2 of fiscal year 2027.
Salesforce has officially announced its intent to acquire m3ter, a London-based startup specializing in metering and rating technology for consumption-based billing. The deal will embed m3ter’s infrastructure natively into Agentforce Revenue Management, enabling Salesforce customers to create, track, and invoice usage-based and outcome-based pricing models directly within the platform. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
This move underscores a fundamental transformation in how software companies generate revenue. Traditional per-seat licensing models worked well when human users were the primary drivers of software consumption, but the rise of autonomous AI agents has created a significant billing challenge. If a single agent can replace ten employees, selling ten licenses no longer makes sense. Salesforce has already begun addressing this shift by transitioning Agentforce to a consumption-based model using Flex Credits, where each agent action costs approximately $0.10.
Founded in 2020 by Griffin Parry and John Griffin, m3ter emerged from the founders’ experience at Amazon Web Services. After co-founding GameSparks, a cloud services company acquired by Amazon in 2017, they spent three years at AWS observing how Amazon’s usage-based billing infrastructure operated at massive scale. They left to build m3ter as a standalone metering layer designed to sit between a product and its billing system.
The platform ingests product usage data in near real time, applies customizable pricing rules, and outputs billable charges to any CRM, ERP, or invoicing system a company uses. m3ter raised $17.5 million in seed funding from Union Square Ventures, Insight Partners, and Kindred Capital in 2022, followed by a $14 million Series A led by Notion Capital in 2023. Its customer base includes Paddle, Onfido, and Sift.
“We founded m3ter to solve the hardest problems in usage-based pricing,” Parry said. “Joining Salesforce allows us to bring our high-scale mediation and rating capabilities to the world’s largest enterprise install base.” The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027, subject to standard regulatory approvals.
m3ter is the latest in a series of strategic acquisitions Salesforce has made to build the infrastructure for its AI agent strategy. The company recently acquired Contentful for a native content layer, completed an $8 billion deal for Informatica in late 2025 for data integration, and bought Momentum, Qualified, and Cimulate for conversation intelligence, AI sales engagement, and digital experience simulation respectively.
The pattern is unmistakable. Salesforce is assembling the components necessary to make Agentforce a complete platform rather than a feature tacked onto its existing CRM. m3ter fills the monetization gap, providing the essential infrastructure to charge customers for what AI agents actually do. Without native metering, enterprises running consumption-based models must stitch together third-party billing tools or build custom integrations, a challenge that grows more complex as pricing models evolve.
Whether this translates into revenue growth is the question investors are closely watching. Salesforce reported $11.13 billion in revenue for fiscal Q1 2027, up 13% year over year, with Agentforce reaching $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue. The stock fell roughly 1.7% on the day of the m3ter announcement, trading closer to its 52-week low of $163.52 than its high of $276.80.
Investors want evidence that consumption-based AI revenue can scale quickly enough to offset the structural threat to seat-based licensing. A billing infrastructure acquisition is a bet on plumbing rather than a growth catalyst, and the market responded accordingly.
For m3ter, the outcome is a fast exit for a company that raised just $31.5 million in total funding. For Salesforce, it represents another piece in a stack that now spans data (Informatica), content (Contentful), agents (Agentforce), and billing (m3ter). The open question is whether enterprises will consolidate on that stack or continue assembling their own from best-of-breed vendors, a decision that the shift to consumption pricing makes more consequential with every agent deployed.
(Source: The Next Web)