Orb

Orb was founded in 2021 by Alvaro Morales (CEO) and Kshitij Grover (CTO), who had spent roughly five years together as engineering leaders at Asana, where they were repeatedly tasked with implementing major changes to product pricing and packaging. That experience -- painful for both engineering and finance teams -- convinced them that legacy billing systems were too rigid to keep pace with how modern software companies wanted to monetize. Morales, who was born and raised in Lima, Peru and has lived in San Francisco for years, and Grover set out to bring a 'developer-first, data infrastructure' approach to billing: rather than starting from commercial constructs like 'subscription' or 'contract,' Orb ingests raw product usage events and lets customers define arbitrary pricing logic on top of that data.

Orb raised a $5.1M seed round in 2021 led by Greylock (Saam Motamedi), followed by a $14M Series A led by Menlo Ventures, bringing total funding to $19.1M by the time Orb came out of stealth and publicly launched in March 2023. Early reference customers included Airbyte, Dune, and Materialize, and the company had roughly 14 employees at launch, with plans to double headcount by year-end. Orb positioned itself against both point-solution usage-metering startups (Metronome, m3ter, Zenskar) and payments-first billing tools (Stripe Billing), arguing that fragmenting revenue data across multiple systems creates an operational challenge for finance, product, and engineering stakeholders alike.

Growth accelerated sharply with the generative AI boom: by September 2024, Orb's revenue had grown nearly 5x year-over-year and its customer base had tripled to include AI-native companies such as Vercel, Replit, Pinecone, and Perplexity, with particular traction in AI, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and dev tools verticals. This growth underpinned a $25M Series B round (announced September 17, 2024) led by Mayfield Fund, with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Greylock, Basecase, South Park Commons, and Scribble Ventures, plus new investor Uncorrelated Ventures; Mayfield's Sri Pangulur joined Orb's board. The round brought total funding to $44M (later cited as $44.1M by PitchBook) at what Morales described as a 'significant' step-up in valuation (undisclosed). By early 2025, Business Insider/PitchBook named Orb among the 30 early-stage startups most likely to become tech's next unicorns.

Business model

B2B SaaS / usage-based infrastructure sold to software and AI companies as a developer-first billing and revenue platform, typically priced on the customer's own billed revenue/usage volume processed through Orb

Platform/subscription plus usage-based fees tied to the volume of billing events, invoices, and revenue processed for customers