Zuora bought Togai, the Chennai startup that meters AI usage for billing

Togai is a Chennai-built SaaS metering and pricing engine for monetising large language models and other AI systems.

That AI companies would need metering and usage-based billing purpose-built for LLM workloads instead of months-long homegrown systems.

Founded in 2022 in Chennai by Abhishek Rajagopal, Aravind Sriraman and Tholkappiyam Velavan, backed by Together Fund.

Its low-code builder let developers and finance teams model any pricing together; Rajagopal argued internal metering systems 'quickly evolve into a dedicated team of engineers', while Togai goes live in hours.

On 2024-05-02 Zuora announced its intent to acquire Togai, expected to close that month; Togai's metering and rating joins Zuora Billing, Revenue, Payments, Zephr and Zuora Platform.

AI pricing is usage-based by nature — per token, per image, per second — and no legacy subscription billing handled that natively.

Metering is the hard part: whoever captures the events reliably owns the billing relationship for AI products.

Zuora's customers were all being pushed toward usage models, so buying the engine beat building one against a moving target.

A developer-facing, low-code wedge gave Togai adoption inside accounts that finance-led incumbents struggled to reach.

When a platform shift creates the same billing problem for every customer, the startup that owns metering becomes the acquisition the incumbent needs to stay relevant.

The deal was expected to be finalised in May 2024, subject to customary approvals and closing conditions, folding Togai into a suite already used by enterprises worldwide. The exit came amid a slower Indian startup M&A market — 123 deals in 2023 versus 240 in 2022 — and an Indian SaaS industry McKinsey projected to reach $50-70 billion by 2030.