The TL;DR
Salesforce acquires m3ter, a London-based metering platform, to add traditional usage billing to Agentforce Revenue Management.
Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire m3ter, a London-based metering and measurement platform built for usage-based billing. The agreement will integrate m3ter’s infrastructure natively into Agentforce Revenue Management, giving Salesforce customers the ability to introduce, track, and use-based and results-based pricing models without leaving the platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition represents a structural change in the way software companies charge for their products. Conventional per-seat subscriptions made sense when humans were the primary users, but AI agents that automate work create a billing problem: if one agent replaces ten workers, selling ten licenses is no longer viable. Salesforce itself has been navigating this tension, moving Agentforce to a usage model built on Flex Credits where each agent’s action costs around $0.10.
m3ter was founded in 2020 by Griffin Parry and John Griffin, who previously founded GameSparks, a cloud services company acquired by Amazon in 2017. The pair spent three years at AWS after the acquisition, where they saw firsthand how Amazon’s usage-based billing infrastructure works at scale. They went on to build m3ter as an independent metering layer that would sit between the product and its payment system.
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The platform imports product usage data in near real-time, applies configurable pricing rules, and extracts billable charges from any CRM, ERP, or invoicing system the 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 clients include Paddle, Onfido, and Sift.
“We created m3ter to solve the most difficult problems in usage-based pricing,” said Parry. “Joining Salesforce allows us to bring our mediation capabilities and excellence to the world’s largest enterprise installation base.” The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s 2027 fiscal year, subject to customary closing conditions.
m3ter is the latest in a series of acquisitions Salesforce has made to round out the infrastructure for its AI agent strategy. The company acquired Contentful earlier this month for a native content layer, completed an $8 billion Informatica deal through late 2025 for data integration, and bought Momentum, Qualified, and Simulate for conversational intelligence, marketing AI, and digital experience simulation respectively.
The pattern is clear: Salesforce buys the components it needs to make Agentforce a complete platform rather than a feature tied to its existing CRM. m3ter fills the monetization gap, the infrastructure needed to actually charge customers for what AI agents do. Without native meters, businesses using usage-based models must integrate third-party payment tools or build custom integrations, a problem that becomes more difficult as pricing models grow in complexity.
Whether this translates into revenue growth is the question for investors. Salesforce reported $11.13 billion in fiscal Q1 2027 revenue, up 13% year over year, while Agentforce hit $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue. The stock fell about 1.7% on the day of m3ter’s announcement, sitting closer to its 52-week low of $163.52 than its high of $276.80.
Investors are looking for proof that usage-based AI revenue can grow fast enough to offset the structural threat to seat-based licensing. Paying infrastructure acquisition is a bet on pipelines rather than a catalyst for growth, and the market has priced it accordingly.
For m3ter, the result is a quick exit for a company that has raised just $31.5 million in total funding. In Salesforce, it’s another piece in the stack that now includes data (Informatica), content (Content), agents (Agentforce), and billing (m3ter). The question is whether businesses will integrate into that stack or continue to integrate their own into best-of-breed vendors, choosing whether the shift to usage rates makes it more relevant to each agent used.
