Paris-based Lago, an open-source metering & usage-based billing platform, announced that it has secured $22M (approximately €20M) in a fresh round of funding led by FirstMark.
Others, including Y Combinator, New Wave, and Script, as well as industry veterans Meghan Gill (who has led the monetisation efforts of MongoDB for 14 years), Romain Huet (former head of Developer Relations at Stripe—now leading OpenAI developer experience), and Clément Delangue (CEO of AI open platform Hugging Face), also participated.
As a part of the funding round, FirstMark’s General Partner Matt Turck is joining the board.
Birth of Lago
Anh-Tho Chuong and Raffi Sarkissian, founders of Lagos, were among the earliest employees at Qonto.com, a B2B neobank. There, they led the company’s revenue growth from pre-product to tens of millions of ARR.
During their stint at Qonto, they wanted to build something on their own.
As a result, they applied and got in Y Combinator shortly after, pitching “a no-code data tool for Growth Marketing teams.”
A few months later, they shipped their product and decided to make their users pay from day 1.
And that’s when they re-discovered the pain of setting up a billing system for a B2B SaaS.
Thus born, Lago!
Lago offers a self-hosted and cloud, scalable, and modular architecture for metering and usage-based billing. It is an open-source alternative to Stripe, focused on transparency, metering, developer experience, and composability.
By emphasising flexibility and open-source principles, Lago aims to create the most adaptable billing engine, empowering developers to tackle diverse billing use cases.
Lago’s growth
Lago says it has experienced remarkable developer traction, becoming the leading open-source repository on GitHub for billing solutions in under two years with more than 5,000 Gitstars, all without any investment in advertising or marketing.
Through inbound leads, Lago has successfully onboarded numerous companies, including Mistral AI, citing the company’s commitment to the open-source ecosystem and developer-first approach.
“We chose Lago as our billing provider because we believe in the open-source ecosystem. They have been able to follow the pace of our releases and have allowed us to focus on what we do best,” says Timothée Lacroix, co-founder and CTO at Mistral.ai
The French company’s mission extends beyond being merely an alternative to existing billing platforms.
The company aims to revolutionise billing processes for engineers, making billing data accessible to adjacent systems and fostering collaboration around pricing and revenue modeling.
01
The achilles’ heel of cloud security: Why two-factor authentication isn’t enough