Schematic raises $6.5M to fix SaaS pricing for the AI era with real-time monetization on Stripe

SaaS pricing is breaking under the weight of AI. What used to be simple—charge per seat, bill monthly—no longer fits a world where usage spikes unpredictably, and costs rack up in real time. Schematic is stepping into that gap with fresh funding and a clear pitch: pricing should work the same way modern software does—live, flexible, and enforced inside the product.

The Boulder-based AI startup has raised $6.5 million in new funding, bringing its total to more than $12 million. The round includes S3 Ventures, MHS Capital, Active Capital, NextView Ventures, and Ritual Capital, along with angel investors from the founding teams behind LaunchDarkly, CrowdStrike, and Salesloft. The company plans to unveil its Stripe App on stage at Stripe Sessions next week, signaling a deeper push into the billing ecosystem it’s building around.

Founded in 2023 by Fynn Glover, Gio Hobbins, and Ben Papillon, Schematic is tackling a problem most SaaS teams know too well but rarely solve cleanly. Pricing logic tends to get buried in code. Over time, it turns into a patchwork of rules, exceptions, and workarounds that slow down product teams and frustrate customers. The shift toward AI has made that setup harder to maintain.

“Software used to be deterministic. AI changed that. Value and cost now accrue at runtime, non-deterministically,” said Glover. “Pricing has to be enforced at runtime too. A shadow enforcement system catching webhooks from a billing provider can’t keep up.”

Schematic’s approach sits between the application and the billing system. Instead of hard-coding access rules and limits, companies define entitlements—what a user can do, how much they can use, and under what conditions—inside Schematic. Engineering teams add a single entitlement check per feature. Product and commercial teams manage plans, limits, and exceptions in one place, with everything synced to Stripe for billing.

The shift may sound subtle, though it touches one of the hardest layers of modern software. Billing platforms handle subscriptions and invoices. They don’t control what happens inside the product itself. That responsibility falls on engineering teams, who end up maintaining pricing logic long after launch.

“Entitlements is one of the hardest problems in Billing,” said Wisam Hirzalla, a senior product leader at Stripe Billing, as Stripe brings Schematic in as an official app.

The timing reflects a broader shift across SaaS. Seat-based pricing dominated for years. AI has upended that model. Products now charge by usage, credits, or a mix of both. Costs can swing based on how often a model runs or how much data it processes. Static plans can’t keep pace with that kind of variability.

Schematic is betting that real-time enforcement inside the product will replace the old approach. Early customers suggest there’s demand for it. The company counts Plotly, Automox, Florence, Blackcloak, Sema4.ai, Uniqode, OneCrew, Zep, and Pagos among its users, and reports zero churn over the past year.

Plotly rolled out Schematic in three weeks and used it to launch two AI products with credit-based pricing in half the time it had budgeted. The new plan brought in 5,000 users shortly after launch.

“Without Schematic, feature entitlements, limits, and access logic is just technical debt waiting to happen,” said Ben Postlethwaite, VP of Engineering at Plotly. “Maintaining this infra in-house slows down product and sales.”

The new capital will go toward expanding Schematic’s Stripe integration, building out what it calls a monetization control layer for go-to-market teams, and extending its developer tooling and SDKs.

The company’s pitch lands at a moment when pricing is moving from a finance decision to a core product function. AI has blurred the line between usage and value. Schematic is trying to give teams a way to keep up without rewriting their pricing logic every time the product evolves.