A look at the operators quietly shaping how today's fastest-growing software companies grow.

Kevin Grüneberg at Supabase sends 1.5 million invoices every month.

Kevin's role didn't exist at most software companies five years ago. Today, some version of it exists at nearly every fast-growing one.

That's because every company eventually reaches a point where building the product is no longer the hard part. The harder question becomes: how do we turn what we've built into a business that can evolve as quickly as the product itself?

That question used to have a simple answer. Finance owned pricing. Engineering built the product. Sales sold it. Revenue happened somewhere downstream.

That world no longer exists.

Today, product launches are pricing decisions. Engineering decisions become monetization decisions. Finance teams shape customer experience. Business operations teams determine how quickly a company can adapt to the market.

Revenue is no longer a function. It's a system.

And the fastest-growing companies have realized something important: owning revenue isn't a job title — it's a cross-functional responsibility.

At Orb, we see this shift up close. The fastest-growing software and AI companies run their pricing and billing on our infrastructure, which means the people redefining revenue ownership — the billing engineers, finance leaders, business operators, and product teams — are the people we work with every day.

This piece is about them, and what they're teaching us about how modern companies grow.

The new owners of revenue

Ask ten high-growth software companies who owns revenue, and you'll get ten different answers.

A billing engineer. A Head of Finance. A VP of Business Operations. A Product Manager. A Revenue Operations lead. A founder.

They're all right — because what they're really describing isn't an organizational chart. It's a shared responsibility.

Someone has to answer questions like:

• Can we launch this new pricing model?
• Can engineering support it without months of rework?
• Will finance be able to close accurately?
• Can customers understand what they're paying for?
• Can we change it again six months from now?

Those questions don't belong to one department anymore. They sit at the intersection of engineering, product, finance, and operations.

That's what owning revenue looks like today.

Revenue starts with engineering

When Jasper set out to choose a billing system, Dakota Brown wasn't worried about picking the wrong vendor.

He was worried about something bigger: building the wrong billing system and living with those decisions for years. The real cost wasn't implementation. It was losing future flexibility.

Most people think revenue begins when an invoice is sent. In reality, it begins much earlier — with the systems that determine what gets measured, what gets priced, and what customers ultimately experience.

At Dremio, Ryan Tse wrestles with a different version of the same problem: how do you build billing infrastructure that keeps pace with an ambitious engineering roadmap instead of slowing it down? As products become more sophisticated, the monetization layer can't become the bottleneck.

And at Supabase, Kevin's millions of monthly invoices are only possible because the underlying infrastructure was designed for accuracy and clarity from the start.

These leaders aren't working on "billing." They're designing the infrastructure that lets their companies monetize new ideas quickly.

Product is designing the business model

When Factory launches a new AI capability, Francesca LaBianca has to answer a deceptively simple question: how should customers pay for it?

As VP of Business Operations, she helps the company adapt its commercial model as AI capabilities evolve. Pricing isn't revisited once a year. It's an ongoing design problem that has to move at the pace of product development. Her colleague, CTO Eno Reyes, is building the technical architecture that supports that flexibility from the ground up.

For AI companies especially, pricing has become part of product development. Every new capability raises new questions. Should customers pay per seat? Per agent? Per outcome? Per token? Per API call?

The product isn't finished until those questions are answered.

That's a remarkable shift. Pricing isn't happening after the product ships. It's becoming part of the product itself.

Finance has become a strategic growth function

Ask Stas Karchevskiy where Alchemy's customers go to understand their relationship with the company, and he won't point you to a dashboard or a CRM.

He'll point you to the billing system.

Stas describes billing infrastructure as the cornerstone of Alchemy's revenue stack — not because it sends invoices, but because it's where customers understand their usage, monitor spend, and interact with the commercial relationship itself.

Modern finance teams aren't just responsible for closing the books. They're responsible for making growth sustainable: ensuring enterprise contracts can be supported operationally, giving customers visibility into their spend, and connecting revenue recognition, billing, CRM, analytics, and reporting into one cohesive system.

At Baseten, Deepak Bhandarkar thinks about billing as the connective tissue between engineering velocity and financial precision. Every model run needs to become revenue the business can recognize from day one.

And at Sanity, Helen Chao highlighted the stakes of getting it wrong: billing failures don't just create accounting issues. They delay close, increase operational work, and erode customer trust.

Finance isn't downstream anymore. It's helping shape how the business grows.

Revenue is where every function meets

Across our conversations with these leaders — and across the hundreds of high-growth companies building on Orb — one pattern kept emerging.
Engineering optimizes for speed. Product optimizes for customer value. Finance optimizes for accuracy. Operations optimizes for repeatability.
Individually, those goals can conflict. Together, they create something much more powerful: a company that can launch new products quickly, experiment with pricing confidently, support increasingly sophisticated customers, and adapt as markets evolve — without rebuilding the business every time.

That's why revenue has become one of the most interdisciplinary problems in modern software. And why the people solving it rarely fit neatly into a single department.

Revenue design is becoming its own discipline

Because Orb sits underneath the revenue systems of companies building at the frontier of AI and modern software, we get to watch this discipline take shape in real time — not as a theory, but as a daily practice.

And if there's one thing that vantage point has taught us, it's this: the fastest-growing companies don't think about pricing, billing, finance, or product in isolation. They think about how those systems work together.

Revenue Design isn't simply about choosing a pricing model or generating an invoice. It's the discipline of intentionally designing the systems, processes, and collaboration that turn customer value into sustainable growth.

The technology matters. But the people matter even more.

The billing engineers. The finance leaders. The business operators. The product teams.

They're quietly shaping one of the most important competitive advantages a company can have: the ability to evolve how they monetize just as quickly as they evolve what they build.

Orb is the billing and pricing infrastructure behind many of the companies in this piece. See how leaders at high-growth companies rely on Orb to scale, at withorb.com/customers.