Payments giant Stripe has acquired Metronome, a startup that helps software companies offer usage-based billing, the companies confirmed this week.

Neither company would comment directly on the acquisition, but Upstart Media’s Alex Konrad reported that Stripe is paying $1 billion for the company.

Metronome has raised about $128 million since its 2019 inception from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, New Enterprise Associates, Mango Capital, and Activant Capital. Its last fundraise was a $50 million Series C in February of 2025.

Founded by Dropbox alums Kevin Liu and Scott Woody, Metronome claimed to “dramatically reduce” the engineering investment required by companies for billing integration and maintenance.

In January of 2024, Metronome told TechCrunch that its customers included startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as enterprise companies such as Databricks and Nvidia. Initially, Metronome worked with startups but expanded to the enterprise in 2023.

The company claimed to have seen a 6x increase in ARR in 2023. 

Liu told TC that the rise of AI was a big factor in Metronome’s growth, as many AI companies were “adopting usage-based models,” and companies in general were seeking “to move away from pure subscription and seat-based models to more hybrid and usage-based approaches.”

In a post on X, Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison wrote of the buy: “We’re delighted to welcome @getmetronome to Stripe! Metered pricing is the native business model for the AI era. As far as we can tell, the associated shift in how businesses generate revenue will be as big as the advent of SaaS. (It may even turn out to be considerably bigger.) We’re looking forward to integrating Metronome’s industry-leading capabilities with the rest of the Stripe Billing platform.”

In his own post on X, Metronome CEO Scott Woody said that the San Francisco-based company was “moving to the big leagues.”

He wrote: “Metronome isn’t going away - we’re just gonna scale way, way, way up with all the resources and amazing talent that Stripe has to offer.”

In a blog post, the company said that as Stripe “powers the world’s payments layer, Metronome powers its monetization logic.” Metronome, it added, will become “a core part” of Stripe’s product suite.

Overall, Stripe has acquired at least 19 companies over its lifetime, according to Crunchbase. On June 11, Stripe announced it was picking up crypto wallet provider Privy, a 4-year-old startup that had raised over $40 million in funding. In July of 2024, Stripe made its third acquisition in 14 months when it picked up 13-person Lemon Squeezy, a merchant of record that calculates and pays global sales tax for digital products, handling legal processing and fees in every country.

One of its most high-profile of its acquisitions as of late was its February $1.1 billion purchase of stablecoin platform Bridge — marking the payment giant’s largest acquisition to date and tangible push into crypto. Co-founded in 2022 by Coinbase and Square alumni Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, San Antonio, Texas-based Bridge had built an API that helps companies accept stablecoins.