Ascerta raises $18m Series A to track enterprise AI ROI

The Bellevue-based startup, rebranded from Pay-i, has closed an $18m Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital to scale its Enterprise AI Management

By The Datatech Times Editorial Team AI level 2 of 5
AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean
A brightly lit high-tech control room features a large, curved video wall displaying various data visualizations, with a row of wooden desks incorporating built-in touchscreen monitors in the foreground.

Ascerta, a Bellevue, Washington-based enterprise software startup formerly known as Pay-i, has raised an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital. Hitachi Ventures, BGV and Wipro Ventures also participated, bringing total funding to $22.9 million. The company is using the occasion to announce a rebrand that signals a strategic shift: from AI cost management to a broader pitch around AI value.

The company was founded in 2024 by three Microsoft veterans. Chief executive David Tepper spent 19 years at Microsoft leading GenAI strategy for internal use across Azure. Co-founder Doron Holan spent 27 years there architecting hyperscale throttling infrastructure that handled hundreds of billions of requests daily. Erik Winters is the third co-founder. Ascerta emerged from stealth as Pay-i in May 2025, having raised a $4.9 million seed round focused squarely on AI cost visibility.

How the platform works

Ascerta's platform connects to AI tooling already running across an enterprise, covering Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Salesforce Agentforce, GitHub Copilot, Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, among others. The company groups its software into three products. Atlas tracks AI value, adoption and return on investment across a portfolio of use cases. Forge focuses on engineering teams and measures how effectively developers are using coding agents. Convoy serves organisations that provision their own AI capacity, helping them consolidate workloads and onboard new use cases without disrupting production.

The company says its platform can tie individual model calls to specific business workflows, capturing sub-token costs, hidden fees and enterprise discount structures that standard FinOps tooling misses. Across its current customer base, Ascerta reports that its platform has improved ROI on AI initiatives by 47 per cent, reduced agent launch times by 24 per cent and cut wasted AI spend by 86 per cent. These figures are vendor-reported and have not been independently verified.

Named customers include IT services group Atos and Wipro, which is also a financial backer. Florin Rotar, group CTO and chief AI officer at Atos, said the platform had given the company "the visibility and control we need to scale AI initiatives with confidence" as it moves agentic workloads from pilot to production.

Market context

The problem Ascerta is addressing is real and growing. As enterprises layer models, copilots, coding agents and custom applications on top of one another, the AI cost estate has become structurally complex. Traditional cloud FinOps platforms, including offerings from vendors such as Apptio, Cloudability and CloudHealth, were built to account for infrastructure spend, not to attribute business outcomes to individual AI interactions. A cohort of newer entrants is attempting to close that gap; Ascerta's pitch is that it can do so across the full stack, from cost attribution to productivity measurement to value quantification.

Raman Khanna, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, said most enterprises are now "moving beyond broad AI experimentation and focusing their investments on what delivers measurable business value." The involvement of Wipro Ventures as both investor and customer is notable: it gives Ascerta a distribution channel into Wipro's enterprise client base while providing real-world usage data to sharpen the product.

The category Ascerta is trying to define, which it calls Enterprise AI Management, sits between FinOps and AI observability. Several well-funded startups are pursuing adjacent territory, and the major AI platform vendors have begun adding their own cost and usage dashboards. Whether a standalone platform can hold that ground as hyperscalers deepen their own management tooling is the central question for Ascerta's next phase. The Series A funds will go towards expanding the go-to-market team and broadening integrations across the enterprise AI tool landscape.

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