Ascerta’s co-founders. The company, formerly known as Pay-i, has raised $18 million in Series A funding to expand its platform for measuring AI costs, adoption and business value. / Courtesy of Ascerta
Ascerta, formerly known as Pay-i, announced in Bellevue, Washington, on September 30, 2026, that it has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Dell Technologies Capital. Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures and existing investors also participated, bringing total funding to $22.9 million. The company will use the capital to expand its platform and go-to-market team as it broadens its focus from tracking AI costs to measuring business value.
The platform connects AI spending and usage with the business outcomes each initiative is intended to deliver. Its aim is to help technology and finance executives decide which projects to expand, adjust or discontinue. That approach addresses a measurement problem: figures such as tokens consumed, agent runs and code generated record activity but do not, on their own, establish a return on investment.
“Companies are counting tokens, lines of generated code, and agent runs, struggling to derive the impact AI has on their business,” said David Tepper, Ascerta’s chief executive and co-founder. He said the company’s tools provide insights specific to individual businesses, employees and use cases. The platform combines those measurements with tools intended to reduce waste and improve returns.
Connecting AI spending with business outcomes
Ascerta was founded in 2024 by former Microsoft employees Tepper, Doron Holan and Erik Winters. It emerged from stealth in May 2025 as Pay-i with $4.9 million in seed funding and an initial focus on AI cost management. The company said its rebranding reflects a broader remit covering AI usage, adoption and financial outcomes.
According to Ascerta, the platform works alongside existing enterprise systems, including internally developed applications, Microsoft’s Copilot suite, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Salesforce Agentforce. It also supports coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Codex. The company says it can connect individual model calls to specific use cases while accounting for charges and adjustments such as hidden fees and enterprise discounts.
Its three products address different parts of that process. Atlas measures adoption, business value and return on investment across workflows and AI portfolios. Forge tracks engineering teams’ use of coding agents to help assess productivity, while Convoy supports organisations managing their own AI capacity and adding workloads.
Customer results require context
Ascerta named Atos, Wipro and global insurance carriers among its customers. Across customers, it reported a 47% improvement in return on AI investment, a 24% reduction in agent launch times and an 86% reduction in wasted AI spending. The announcement did not disclose the sample size, measurement period or calculation methods behind those figures, limiting their usefulness as benchmarks.
“At Atos, our Sovereign Agentic Studios operating model is built on moving agentic AI from pilot to production at global scale,” said Florin Rotar, group chief technology officer and chief AI officer at Atos. He said Ascerta had provided visibility and control to support that expansion. Ascerta said customer use cases include assigning dollar values to AI-powered features and identifying spending associated with failed agent runs, duplicate projects and unauthorised AI use.
Raman Khanna, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, said enterprises were focusing investment on AI initiatives that deliver measurable business value. Ascerta plans to expand its integrations with enterprise AI tools and develop additional products for improving returns. Its broader proposition will depend on demonstrating how reliably it can link AI activity to financial outcomes, including the baselines and attribution methods used to measure gains.
