Payments and billing are collapsing into a single financial workflow.
On June 11, 2026, Dutch payments giant Adyen announced it was acquiring Orb, a usage-based billing platform, for $335 million. I looked it up, Orb has just over 1,000 followers on X. This is a story about how the quiet companies powering the AI economy are starting to command serious valuations.
About the deal
Adyen is acquiring Orb through a reverse triangular merger. Orb will operate as an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary under an “incubator model,” allowing it to maintain some independence while integrating with Adyen’s global payments infrastructure. The co-founders are reinvesting a meaningful portion of their proceeds back into Adyen. For context, Orb had raised approximately $44 million in total funding before the deal, including a $25 million Series B in 2024. The $335 million exit marks a strong return for its backers, which include Menlo Ventures, Mayfield, and Greylock.
Revenue design in the AI era
Orb is a revenue design platform built for companies that need flexible, usage-based, and hybrid pricing models. Rather than relying on rigid seat-based subscriptions, Orb helps businesses meter actual consumption — whether that’s API calls, tokens, compute minutes, or agent actions — and convert that usage into accurate, automated billing.Its key strengths include:
- A raw event data architecture with query-based metrics (excellent for handling late-arriving data and retroactive pricing changes)
- Strong tools for pricing experimentation and simulations
- Native invoicing and revenue intelligence
- Solid support for AI-specific models (credits, thresholds, spend controls, and customer-facing dashboards)
Notable customers include Vercel, Glean, Replit, Supabase, Pinecone, and Perplexity. Between early 2024 and its Series B, the company reportedly tripled its customer base, reflecting strong demand from AI and developer-focused businesses.
The origin story of Orb
Orb was founded in 2021 by Alvaro Morales (CEO) and Kshitij Grover (CTO). Both previously worked as engineering leaders at Asana, where they experienced the pain of inflexible billing systems during a major pricing and packaging overhaul.Instead of continuing to work around the limitations of existing tools, they built something purpose-built for modern, usage-driven businesses.
Their origin story is common in infrastructure: two engineers who were tired of bad tooling decided to solve the problem themselves.
Payments and Billing Are Merging
Adyen’s acquisition follows a very similar move by Stripe, which acquired usage-based billing company Metronome for roughly $1 billion earlier this year. Both deals reflect the same strategic shift: traditional payments infrastructure is no longer sufficient on its own. In the AI era, companies need sophisticated metering + flexible pricing + billing tightly integrated.
Usage-based and hybrid models are becoming the default for AI products, and major payments players want to own more of that value chain. Here’s how the two acquisitions compare:
