Bellevue, Washington-based Ascerta, formerly known as Pay-i, has raised $18 million in Series A funding to expand its platform from AI cost tracking into broader enterprise AI management and return-on-investment measurement.
The round was led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures and existing investors.
The new funding brings Ascerta’s total capital raised to $22.9 million. The company previously launched in May 2025 with a $4.9 million seed round.
Ascerta was founded in 2024 by David Tepper, Doron Holan and Erik Winters, all of whom have backgrounds at Microsoft.
Tepper, the company’s CEO, spent 19 years at Microsoft, where he led generative AI strategy for internal use across Azure.
Holan spent 27 years at Microsoft working on hyperscale infrastructure designed to handle hundreds of billions of requests each day.
The company initially launched as Pay-i, focusing on AI cost management. As enterprise adoption of AI increased, the founders identified a broader challenge: businesses were struggling to understand which AI tools and agents were creating measurable business value.
That led to the company’s rebrand to Ascerta and its expansion into what it describes as enterprise AI management.
Ascerta’s platform connects with existing enterprise systems and AI tools to track how AI is being used across organizations.
The platform can monitor AI adoption by employee, team and tool, while helping businesses identify unexpected costs associated with AI applications and agents.
Ascerta supports integrations with platforms including Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Salesforce Agentforce, GitHub Copilot and Claude Code.
The company says unexpected costs can arise from factors such as excessive token usage or AI agents running more frequently than expected.
In one example, an Ascerta customer discovered that an AI agent with an average execution cost of approximately $0.40 had occasional executions costing as much as $70, with those higher-cost runs occurring hundreds of times per day.
Ascerta says its platform has also helped enterprises optimize their AI infrastructure spending.
In one case, a global insurance company used the platform to adjust its AI capacity commitments with a hyperscale cloud provider.
By consolidating multiple AI agents onto shared capacity reservations instead of reserving capacity separately, the company saved approximately $3 million within its first few months, according to Ascerta.
The company currently counts Atos, Wipro and several global financial institutions among its customers.
Ascerta has 15 employees and plans to nearly triple its workforce to approximately 40 employees by the end of 2027.
The latest funding will be used to expand the platform’s capabilities, grow its go-to-market and engineering teams, and add integrations with more major enterprise AI tools.
Ascerta’s broader goal is to help businesses understand not only how much they spend on AI, but also how AI tools and agents contribute to business performance and ROI.
