Ascerta lands $18M Series A to tie enterprise AI spend to ROI
What's the deal? AscertaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, formerly known as Pay-iDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, has raised an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital, with Hitachi VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, BGVDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Wipro VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and existing investors participating. The round brings the Bellevue, Washington-based company's total funding to $22.9 million.
What's the endgame? Ascerta wants to help enterprises measure whether their AI investments actually create business value. The rebrand from Pay-i marks a shift from AI cost management to what it calls Enterprise AI Management: tracking AI cost, adoption, and business outcomes across an organisation.
Why now? Enterprise AI is moving beyond experiments into production. Companies can count tokens, licenses, and agent runs, but those metrics don't show whether an initiative saves time or lifts revenue.
Ascerta connects to AI systems already running inside a company, including Microsoft CopilotDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Amazon Bedrock AgentCoreDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Salesforce AgentforceDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, GitHub CopilotDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Claude CodeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. It then links that activity to the business outcomes it is meant to influence, giving CIOs and CFOs a shared view of usage and financial performance.
The company packages this into three products. Atlas measures AI value and ROI across workflows and portfolios; Forge tracks how engineering teams use coding agents; Convoy helps organisations running their own AI capacity allocate infrastructure without disrupting production.
Who's behind it? Ascerta was founded in 2024 by Microsoft veterans David Tepper, Doron Holan, and Erik Winters. Tepper, chief executive officer, spent 19 years at Microsoft leading generative AI strategy for internal use across Azure. Holan, chief technology officer, spent 27 years there working on hyperscale throttling infrastructure built to handle hundreds of billions of requests per day.
The company emerged from stealth as Pay-i in May 2025 with a $4.9 million seed round centred on AI cost management. Conversations with enterprises then revealed a wider problem: firms wanted to know not just what AI cost, but who used it and whether the activity justified more investment.
Ascerta says its measurement accounts for sub-token costs, hidden fees, and enterprise discounts, and can break data down by person, team, and tool. It currently works with customers including Atos, Wipro, and global insurance carriers.
The signal: At $18 million, the round sits in the upper third of comparable Series A deals, a sign investors see appetite for tools that prove AI's return. As agentic workloads move into production, the pressure on finance and technology leaders to show which projects to scale — and which to stop — is only growing.
Read more: unite.ai
Image credit: PayI
