Lago

We're #hiring a new Enterprise Sales Consultant in Paris, Île-de-France. Apply today or share this post with your network.

Being early is easy to romanticize and brutal to live. $650M, $20B, ... 10 years. That's how long Groq spent building inference infrastructure before Nvidia Timeline of Groq’s journey from its 2016 founding to Nvidia’s reported ~$20B licensing agreement and Groq’s 2026 $650M raise: 2016: founded to build inference chips. Nobody cared about inference. 2017–2023: kept building while the world chased training and bigger models. A few people started caring. 2024: acquired Definitive Intelligence. Sunny Madra led GroqCloud. The chip company became a developer cloud. 2025–2026: Nvidia licenses the tech. Ross and Madra join Nvidia. Groq raises $650M and keeps running independently under Simon Edwards. Today: 13 data centers. 5M+ developers. Trillions of tokens per week. Groq spent a decade being "too early", and ended up defining the category that the biggest player in AI now wants access to. Honored that Lago powers their billing infrastructure. We've had a front-row seat to what conviction, endurance, and brilliance looks like when it compounds! Congrats, and excited for what’s ahead for Groq! 

We're one step closer to agentic payments! Picture an AI agent spinning up infrastructure on Laravel Cloud for a developer. No checkout page, no card to type in. So how does it pay? - Stripe issues a Shared Payment Token: a scoped credential the agent carries, with spending limits, an expiry, and an off switch. - Lago now reads that token and charges the usage invoice against it automatically. (It only kicks in when there's no card on file, so existing payment methods are never touched.) Laravel Cloud bills usage through Lago and built their stack for agents from day one. They needed agents to pay, so they built it and we shipped it to everyone. This is why open source is beautiful. 🫶 The people closest to the problem have the agency to build for it, and share it with everyone, and it compounds! Thank you, Julien Bourdeau and the Laravel team. 🙏

I joined Lago in March to lead the engineering and infra teams This move connects the dots of my career. I've spent years in the data world, learning how to move and make sense of information at scale. Then I moved into fintech, where the money has to be exactly right, every time. Lago sits right at the intersection of those two worlds. It takes massive volumes of usage data and turns it into accurate billing in real time. That's a data problem and a money problem at once, and it happens to be exactly what I've spent my career on. It feels like everything I've done was preparing me for this. Open source is also part of who I am. I spent 17 years building open source software, so this isn't a preference I picked up recently, it's how I believe critical infrastructure should be built. Billing is exactly that kind of infrastructure. Building it in the open means our users can read the code, self-host, and actually trust what runs their revenue. Now that I'm a few months in, I'm more convinced than ever, and we're growing the team. I'm hiring across the tech org right now: senior backend, senior frontend, infrastructure, and an engineering squad lead, plus open roles in product and GTM. If you want to work on hard data and billing problems in open source, with AI built into how we ship every day, take a look: https://getlago.com/hiring Thanks to Anh-Tho Chuong and Raffi Sarkissian for the opportunity. Excited for what's ahead.

Raffi and I are hiring a "Growth Chief of Staff". It's a job I'd have loved earlier in my career: - Take founder-led motions that already work, and turn them into systems that 10x their impact. - Work with the most forward-looking companies as customers (Mistral, CoreWeave, etc.), at the intersection of AI, devtools, pricing, monetization, and product growth. - Start near a blank page on process and tooling. Designing (and building!) AI-led workflows, with the right human in the loop, is expected. - High-agency teammates. Ambitious, technical, very international, across Europe and the US. We're looking for someone senior who can surface priorities, design 1 to N systems, and own outputs and adoption across the org. Why it isn't for everyone: - You report to founders. High intensity, high urgency, high ambiguity. - We hire bar-raisers, not another pair of hands. - Growth is art and science. Eyes on the numbers when they matter, educated intuition when data isn't there or isn't meaningful. - There's always too much work and never enough resources against established competition. Prioritization and thinking differently are the job. Jim carefully crafted the job description, it's in the comments!

If you're 1/ a SaaS willing to price AI features (in addition to a seat-based pricing) 2/ an AI-native company, pricing "cost of LLM + margins" Check out our Agent SDK! You can price "on top of LLMs" (e.g., with Mistral) without rebuilding the plumbing. If you're "none of the above" it's never too late to get started! https://lnkd.in/ei9jBQJz

Metering and billing for Enterprise and AI-first companies isn’t a plug-and-play problem. Every business model is different. Every contract is custom. Every pricing structure evolves. Every finance stack has its own constraints. That’s exactly why we’re building a Sales Engineering function at Lago — and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome Charles. Charles works hands-on with clients from day one: translating complex requirements into the right Lago setup, bridging the gap between what you need and what the product can do, and making sure Lago grows with you. If you’ve ever felt like billing infrastructure was the thing slowing your business down, you’ll want to talk to Charles!