Pay-i rebrands as Ascerta and raises $18M Series A for AI ROI

The company formerly known as Pay-i said Wednesday it rebranded as Ascerta and raised an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital to give CIOs and CFOs one system for AI cost, adoption, and measurable business value — bringing total funding to $22.9 million.

Enterprises can count tokens and agent runs, but still struggle to say which AI projects are worth scaling. Ascerta’s bet is a system of record that ties spend and adoption to business outcomes for CIOs and CFOs. That is the money desk of the AI stack: not a new model, but proof of whether the last one paid off.

On Wednesday, 30 September 2026, Bellevue, Wash.-based Ascerta — formerly known as Pay-i — announced its new name alongside an $18 million Series A. A Series A is an early round of venture funding, once a company has a product and wants to build the next layer. The $18 million is the new money. Dell Technologies Capital led. Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures, and earlier investors took part. GlobeNewswire carries the release. The page stamps September 30, 2026, 09:00 ET, which is 9:00 a.m. Eastern. The dateline is Bellevue, Wash. The round brings total funding to $22.9 million. That total is this round plus what the company had already raised. It is not a valuation, the price a buyer would put on the whole company. Ascerta says the capital will scale what it calls Enterprise AI Management: one view of AI cost, adoption, and business value across the organization. A CIO is the chief information officer, the person who runs a company’s technology. A CFO is the chief financial officer, the person who runs the money. The release says the system is for them, and for AI leaders. Those lines are Ascerta’s.

The problem, in the company’s words. Enterprise AI has moved from experimentation to a material line item. Companies can count tokens, licenses, agent runs, and lines of code that AI wrote, and many still cannot say which of those projects are actually worth scaling. A token is a small piece of text a model reads or writes. An agent, here, is software that takes a next step, such as calling a tool, rather than only answering a question. Ascerta says it was built to give companies that answer. Those lines are Ascerta’s.

Who built it, as the release states it. Ascerta was founded in 2024 by Microsoft veterans David Tepper, Doron Holan, and Erik Winters. Tepper spent 19 years at Microsoft and led generative-AI strategy for internal use across Azure. Generative AI, here, means software that writes or codes something new, rather than only sorting records. Holan spent 27 years at Microsoft and architected throttling infrastructure that the release says handled hundreds of billions of requests a day. Throttling, in that sentence, is the control that slows or stops traffic when a system is overloaded. The company emerged from stealth as Pay-i in May 2025 with a $4.9 million seed round focused on AI cost management. A seed round is the earlier, smaller financing, before this Series A. The $4.9 million seed and this $18 million add up to the $22.9 million total the release prints. Ascerta says adoption then widened the problem. Companies needed to know how AI was being used, what agents and models were doing, and whether that activity created enough value to justify more investment. That shift, it says, drove the new name and an expansion from cost tracking into the full life of enterprise AI value. Those lines are Ascerta’s.

David Tepper, chief executive and co-founder, said the market is full of meaningless vanity metrics. He said companies are counting tokens, lines of generated code, and agent runs, and struggling to derive the impact AI has on the business. He said Ascerta was built to cut through that noise and to give organizations the means to win in the AI era: insights specific to their business, people, and use cases, and tools meant to prevent waste and to optimize for value. He called Ascerta a guide through one of the most pivotal eras of transformation in history. That quotation is his, in the release.

What the product does, as the release describes it. Ascerta gives leaders one system to see how the organization uses AI, what that AI is doing, and whether it pays off. It connects to the AI already running, and it sits alongside systems a company already has, including homegrown applications. The tools it names include Microsoft’s Copilot suite, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Salesforce Agentforce, and coding agents including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex. A coding agent is software that writes or edits code, rather than only chatting. From there, Ascerta says it follows AI from how people use it, through the work it performs, to the outcomes it drives. It says its research ties each use case to the business KPIs that use case was meant to move, so a company can see which initiatives create value, which need fixing, and which should be cut. A KPI is a number the business already uses to judge whether the work paid off. Adoption is tracked by person, team, and tool. On cost, Ascerta says it ties an individual model call to a specific use case, including charges smaller than one token, hidden fees, and enterprise discounts. Those lines are Ascerta’s. The release does not print a price.

Three products, named in the release. Atlas measures AI value, adoption, and ROI, from a single workflow to the full portfolio. ROI is return on investment: what came back compared with what was spent. Forge shows how engineering teams use coding agents and, Ascerta says, turns that adoption into productivity. Convoy is for organizations that provision their own capacity. Provisioned capacity, here, means computing a company reserves for itself, rather than paying only per call. Convoy is supposed to help that company get full value from the capacity and add new use cases without disrupting what is already running. Those lines are Ascerta’s.

Who the release says is using it, and the results Ascerta states. Ascerta says it works with customers including Atos and Wipro, and with global insurance carriers, and alongside partners including Microsoft, AWS, IBM, Slalom, and Trace3. Across customers, the company says the platform has improved ROI on AI initiatives by 47 percent, reduced the time to launch an agent by 24 percent, and cut wasted AI spend by 86 percent. Forty-seven percent is a bit under half again, on the company’s measure of return. Twenty-four percent is about a quarter less time, as Ascerta states it. Eighty-six percent is a bit more than eight dollars cut from every ten dollars of waste the company says it found. Those three figures are Ascerta’s. The release does not say an outside firm measured them. Florin Rotar, group chief technology officer and chief AI officer at Atos, said Atos’s Sovereign Agentic Studios operating model is built on moving agentic AI from a pilot to production at global scale, and that this takes measurable business value, not only technical capability. He said Ascerta has given Atos the visibility and control to scale those initiatives with confidence. That quotation is his, in the release.

What customers use it for, in the release. They put dollar values on features that use AI. They go after spend lost to failed agent runs, duplicate projects, and shadow AI. Shadow AI is an AI tool people use without the company’s official approval. Engineering leaders use it to steer teams toward more effective use of coding agents. Organizations that run their own AI capacity use it to consolidate workloads and to scale new use cases without disrupting production. Raman Khanna, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, said Ascerta is building the system of record for how AI creates value. He said most enterprises are moving past broad experimentation and putting money on what delivers measurable business value. He said David Tepper and the Ascerta team are giving leaders a way to see what is working, to tighten spending, and to scale the initiatives that succeed. He said Dell Technologies Capital is partnering as Ascerta defines the category it calls Enterprise AI Management. That quotation is his, in the release.

Where the money goes, as the release states it. Enterprise AI, Ascerta says, now spans models, copilots, coding agents, internal applications, and GPU capacity, and it is scaling faster than companies can account for it. A GPU is the chip that does the heavy math for a model. FinOps is the practice of tracking technology spend so a finance team can see the bill. Traditional FinOps tools, the release says, can show what AI costs. They do not show what that spend is doing for the business, and Ascerta says the gap widens as agents take on more work. Ascerta says the Series A will scale the platform and the go-to-market team. Go-to-market is the work of selling the product and supporting the companies that buy it. It also plans to extend the connections to every major enterprise AI tool, building on coverage it says already includes nearly all of them. It says it is turning research on AI value into new products, from measuring what AI is worth toward actively improving it. The about box calls Ascerta the platform that connects AI cost and performance to business outcomes, and says it is backed by Dell Technologies Capital, Hitachi Ventures, BGV, and Wipro Ventures. The release does not print a valuation, a general price, or a regulatory approval.

The picture is Ascerta’s Executive Scorecard, the product screen. A dark panel carries the Ascerta wordmark and the label Executive Scorecard. Three tiles read AI spend of $2.4 million, up 18 percent versus last quarter; 3,140 people using AI, up 22 percent versus last quarter; and adoption of 64 percent, up 9 points versus last quarter. A fourth mark reads 47 percent ROI improvement, the same percentage the release states for return on AI initiatives. A list of top use cases shows customer support at 91 percent, code generation at 84 percent, document processing at 76 percent, data analysis at 68 percent, and sales enablement at 54 percent. A spend split shows models at 42 percent, infrastructure at 24 percent, agents at 18 percent, and licenses at 16 percent. It is the product interface. The $2.4 million, the headcount, and the category bars are labels on that screen. The release does not print them as a separate measured result. The screen does not print a calendar date.

In plain terms, the company formerly known as Pay-i said on Wednesday that it is now Ascerta, and that it raised $18 million led by Dell Technologies Capital, for a total of $22.9 million. The product it describes is one view of what AI costs, who is using it, and which projects are worth scaling. Atlas, Forge, and Convoy are the three products it names. Atos and Wipro are among the customers it cites. The 47 percent, 24 percent, and 86 percent figures are Ascerta’s. The release does not print a valuation or a price.