The Pulse
Ascerta Raises $18 Million to Measure Enterprise AI Returns
Ascerta, formerly Pay-i, announced an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital on September 30, 2026. The Bellevue company says its platform connects enterprise AI costs and usage to business outcomes.
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
Companies can count AI tokens, licenses and agent runs, but those numbers do not tell executives which projects merit more investment. Ascerta is betting that gap can support a business: the Bellevue, Washington, startup announced an $18 million Series A on September 30, pitching its software as a way to connect enterprise AI use and costs to business results.
The round was led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures and earlier investors FUSE, Tola Capital and Gaia Ventures. The company says the financing brings its total funding to $22.9 million. The announcement also marks a name change: the company previously operated as Pay-i.
From AI spending to business outcomes
Ascerta says its platform gives chief information officers, finance leaders and AI teams a shared view of AI costs, adoption and value. It connects to tools already in use, including Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Salesforce Agentforce, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Codex, as well as applications built in-house.
The company’s case is that activity measures—such as model calls or generated code—are not the same as evidence of business value. Ascerta says its research links individual AI use cases to the business performance indicators they are intended to affect, helping customers assess which initiatives to expand, improve or stop. The company also says it tracks costs down to individual model calls, including sub-token costs, hidden fees and enterprise discounts.
Three products target different parts of the job
Ascerta packages the platform into three products. Atlas measures value, adoption and return on investment across workflows and portfolios. Forge focuses on engineering teams’ use of coding agents, while Convoy is designed for organizations managing their own AI capacity and workloads.
That puts Ascerta between two competing views of enterprise AI: tracking what the technology consumes and judging what the work produces. Its announcement describes a shift from AI cost management, the company’s original focus, toward what it calls Enterprise AI Management. Whether customers can consistently connect AI activity to business results is central to that broader pitch.
Customer results are company-reported
Ascerta says its customers include Atos, Wipro and global insurance carriers, and that its partners include Microsoft, AWS, IBM, Slalom and Trace3. It reports that its platform has improved return on investment for AI initiatives by 47%, reduced agent launch times by 24% and cut wasted AI spending by 86%. Those figures are the company’s own reported results; the announcement does not describe an independent evaluation or provide the underlying study methodology.
Atos’s Group CTO and Chief AI Officer, Florin Rotar, said the company’s operating model depends on moving agentic AI from pilots into production. “That requires measurable business value, not just technical capability,” Rotar said in the announcement.
Funding will support platform and sales expansion
Ascerta says it will use the Series A to expand its platform and go-to-market team, while extending integrations to enterprise AI tools. The company emerged from stealth in May 2025 as Pay-i with a $4.9 million seed round focused on managing AI costs.
For Ascerta, the new financing backs a broader claim than cost control: that companies can use one system to weigh AI spending against adoption and business outcomes. The company’s customer figures and its promised expansion remain its own claims; the funding announcement does not supply independent validation of the reported performance gains.