Ascerta Raises $18M to Tie Enterprise AI Spending to Business Results

Counting AI activity is not the same as proving it pays off. Ascerta is making that distinction its business: on September 30, 2026, it announced an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital. The startup promises to connect spending and adoption to business results, but the performance figures accompanying its financing announcement remain company-reported.

Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures and earlier investors also participated. The round brings Ascerta’s total funding to $22.9 million. The company says it will use the money to grow its platform and go-to-market team, while extending integrations to every major enterprise AI tool.

The financing came with a new name. Ascerta was previously Pay-i, which emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $4.9 million seed round focused on AI cost management. Founded in 2024 by Microsoft veterans David Tepper, Doron Holan and Erik Winters, the company now describes its remit as Enterprise AI Management: measuring cost, adoption and value together.

Companies are counting tokens, lines of generated code, and agent runs, struggling to derive the impact AI has on their business.

David Tepper, Ascerta CEO and co-founder

From a model call to a business outcome

Ascerta says its platform connects to AI systems already running inside a company rather than replacing them. Its named integrations span homegrown applications, Microsoft’s Copilot suite, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Salesforce Agentforce. Coding tools include GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Codex.

The company describes a chain from how people use AI, through the work it performs, to the outcomes it produces. It says its research links each use case to the business performance measures it was intended to improve. The aim is to identify projects worth scaling, projects needing repairs and projects that should be cut.

That measurement reaches into both people and infrastructure. Ascerta says it tracks adoption by person, team and tool to identify effective use and guide training. On spending, it ties individual model calls to specific use cases and accounts for hidden fees and enterprise discounts.

Three products divide the work

• Atlas measures AI value, adoption and return on investment, covering individual workflows as well as a company’s full portfolio.
• Forge focuses on engineering teams’ use of coding agents, with the stated goal of turning adoption into productivity.
• Convoy serves organizations that provision their own computing capacity. Ascerta says it helps them use that capacity fully and add workloads without disrupting production.

Those products reflect the broader scope of the rebrand: Ascerta is no longer pitching cost accounting alone. Its examples include putting dollar values on AI-powered features, recovering spending lost to failed agent runs and duplicate projects, and consolidating workloads for customers operating their own AI capacity.

Customer names, but limited measurement detail

Ascerta names Atos, Wipro and global insurance carriers as customers. Atos chief technology and AI officer Florin Rotar endorsed the platform in the announcement, saying it provides visibility and control as Atos moves agentic AI from pilots into production at global scale.

Across customers, Ascerta claims a 47% improvement in AI initiative return on investment, a 24% reduction in agent launch times and an 86% reduction in wasted AI spending. The announcement does not disclose the sample size, measurement period or baselines behind those figures. That leaves readers unable to assess how broadly the claimed gains apply.

The next stated step goes beyond measurement. Ascerta says it is turning its research in AI value optimization into new products intended to actively improve outcomes. The Series A funds that direction alongside platform growth and sales expansion; the announcement does not give a release timetable for those future products.