Ascerta raises $18M to help enterprises maximize AI ROI

BELLEVUE, WA, Sept. 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Enterprise AI has moved from experimentation to a material line item. Companies can count tokens, licenses, agent runs and lines of AI-generated code, yet many still cannot answer the question that determines what happens next: which AI initiatives are actually worth scaling.

Ascerta was built to give them that answer. Today, the company formerly known as Pay-i announced its new name alongside an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures and earlier investors. The round brings total funding to $22.9 million and will help Ascerta scale what it calls Enterprise AI Management, giving companies a single view of AI cost, adoption and business value across the organization.

Ascerta founders: (L to R) Doron Holan, David Tepper and Erik Winters. 

From managing AI cost to AI value
Ascerta was founded in 2024 by Microsoft veterans David Tepper, Doron Holan and Erik Winters, who saw firsthand how quickly AI economics break at enterprise scale. Tepper spent 19 years at Microsoft and led GenAI strategy for internal use across Azure, while Holan spent 27 years there and architected hyperscale throttling infrastructure handling hundreds of billions of requests a day.

The company emerged from stealth as Pay-i in May 2025 with a $4.9 million seed round focused on AI cost management. As adoption accelerated, the problem widened: enterprises needed to know how AI was being used, what agents and models were doing, and whether that activity was creating enough value to justify more investment. That shift drove the rebrand to Ascerta and an expansion into the full lifecycle of enterprise AI value.

"The market is full of meaningless vanity metrics," said David Tepper, CEO and Co-Founder of Ascerta. "Companies are counting tokens, lines of generated code, and agent runs, struggling to derive the impact AI has on their business. We built Ascerta to cut through the noise and give organizations the means to win in the AI-era. That means insights specific to their business, people, and use cases. That means purpose-built tools to prevent waste and aggressively optimize for value. Ascerta is a guide through one of the most pivotal eras of transformation in history."

Ascerta executive scorecard illustrating AI value to enterprises. 

How Ascerta works 
Ascerta gives leaders one system to see how their organization uses AI, what that AI is doing and whether it pays off. It connects to the AI already running across the enterprise and deploys alongside existing systems. That includes homegrown applications and most common enterprise AI tools such as Microsoft’s Copilot suite, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Salesforce Agentforce and major coding agents including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex.

From there, Ascerta follows AI from how people use it, through the work it performs, to the outcomes it drives. Its proprietary research ties each use case to the business KPIs it was meant to move, showing which initiatives create value, which need fixing and which should be cut. It tracks adoption by person, team and tool, so organizations can see who is getting real results and help everyone else build AI fluency. Underneath it all, Ascerta measures the true cost of AI with the most granular accuracy on the market. That goes down to tying individual model calls to specific use cases, including sub-token costs, hidden fees and enterprise discounts that other tools miss.

Three products put this to work across the AI estate. Atlas measures AI value, adoption and ROI, from a single workflow to the full portfolio. Forge shows how engineering teams use coding agents and turns that adoption into real productivity. Convoy helps organizations that provision their own capacity get full value from it and add new use cases without disrupting production.

Customer traction 
Today, Ascerta works with customers including Atos, Wipro, and global insurance carriers and alongside partners such as Microsoft, AWS, IBM, Slalom, and Trace3. Across customers, the company says its platform has improved ROI on AI initiatives by 47%, reduced agent launch times by 24% and cut wasted AI spend by 86%.

“At Atos, our Sovereign Agentic Studios operating model is built on moving agentic AI from pilot to production at global scale,” said Florin Rotar, Group CTO and Chief AI Officer at Atos. “That requires measurable business value, not just technical capability. Ascerta has been instrumental in delivering on that promise, giving us the visibility and control we need to scale AI initiatives with confidence.”

Customers use Ascerta to put hard dollar values on AI-powered features, recover spend lost to failed agent runs, duplicate projects and Shadow AI. Engineering leaders use it to guide teams toward more effective use of coding agents. Organizations running their own AI capacity use it to consolidate workloads and scale new use cases without disrupting production. 

“Ascerta is building the system of record for AI value creation,” said Raman Khanna, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital. “Most enterprises are moving beyond broad AI experimentation and focusing their investments on what delivers measurable business value. David and the Ascerta team are giving leaders the visibility and rigor they need to understand what’s working, optimize spending and scale their most successful AI initiatives. We’re excited to partner with Ascerta as they define the Enterprise AI Management category.”

Why this matters today
Enterprise AI is scaling faster than companies can account for it. It now spans models, copilots, coding agents, internal applications and GPU capacity. Traditional FinOps tools can show what it costs, but not what it's doing for the business, and that gap widens as agents take on more work. Ascerta closes it by connecting how people use AI and what it costs to the outcomes it drives. That shows leaders what's working, what needs fixing and where to invest next.

Looking ahead
Ascerta will use the Series A to scale its platform and go-to-market team. It also plans to extend its integrations to every major enterprise AI tool, building on coverage that already includes nearly all of them.

As enterprises run thousands of models, agents and workflows, they need more than a view of what AI costs. Ascerta is turning its research in AI value optimization into new products, moving from measuring what AI is worth to actively improving it.

Media images can be found here. 

About Ascerta
Ascerta is the Enterprise AI Management platform that helps companies transition to AI-first operations by measuring, optimizing, and scaling AI value. Ascerta connects AI cost and performance to business outcomes, giving leaders a continuous, trusted picture of where to act and where to accelerate. Ascerta is backed by Dell Technologies Capital, Hitachi Ventures, BGV, and Wipro Ventures. Learn more at https://ascerta.com/

For further information please contact the Ascerta press office via Bilal Mahmood on [email protected] or +447714007257

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