Ascerta Raises $18M from Dell to Help Enterprises Measure Which AI Investments Actually Pay Off

Ascerta Secures $18M Series A to Expand Enterprise AI Management Platform

Ascerta raises $18M in Series A funding led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures, and existing investors1

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. The round brings total funding to $22.9 million for the Bellevue, Washington-based startup, which emerged from stealth as Pay-i in May 2025 with a $4.9 million seed round1

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. The fresh capital will fuel expansion of Ascerta's platform capabilities, grow go-to-market and engineering teams, and extend integrations to support every major enterprise AI tool2

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From AI Cost Management to Measuring AI-Driven Business Impact

Founded in 2024 by Microsoft veterans David Tepper, Doron Holan, and Erik Winters, Ascerta initially focused on AI cost management under its former name Pay-i1

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. Tepper spent 19 years at Microsoft leading generative AI strategy for internal use across Azure, while Holan spent 27 years architecting hyperscale throttling infrastructure handling hundreds of billions of requests daily2

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. As enterprise AI adoption accelerated, the founders recognized companies were struggling to understand the value AI provides and which tools actually drive business results. This realization prompted the rebrand to Ascerta and a strategic shift toward what the company calls Enterprise AI Management—a comprehensive approach to track AI business value across organizations1

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Solving the Enterprise AI ROI Challenge

While companies can easily count tokens, licenses, agent runs, and lines of AI-generated code, most cannot answer which AI investments are actually worth scaling1

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. Traditional FinOps tools that work for cloud infrastructure fail to reveal real-world business outcomes achieved by AI agents or coding assistants3

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. David Tepper explains that most businesses only see "meaningless vanity metrics" and struggle to derive the real impact AI has on their business1

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. Ascerta was built to cut through this noise and give organizations insights specific to their business, people, and use cases to measure AI-driven business impact and optimize for return on investment from AI1

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How Ascerta Tracks AI Costs and Business Value

Ascerta's platform connects to existing AI systems across the enterprise, including Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Salesforce Agentforce, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex1

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. The platform follows AI from how people use it, through the work it performs, to the outcomes it drives, tying each use case to the business KPIs it was meant to move1

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. It tracks AI adoption by person, team, and tool, revealing who gets real results and helping others build AI fluency1

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. Ascerta measures true AI cost with granular accuracy down to individual model calls tied to specific use cases, including sub-token costs, hidden fees, and enterprise discounts that other tools miss1

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Three Products Deliver Cost Optimization and AI ROI Insights

Atlas measures AI value, AI adoption, and AI ROI from a single workflow to the full portfolio1

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. Forge shows how engineering teams use coding agents and turns that adoption into real productivity gains1

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. Convoy helps organizations that provision their own capacity extract full value from it and add new use cases without disrupting production1

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Real-World Results: Cutting Wasted AI Spend by 86%

Ascerta works with customers including Atos, Wipro, and global insurance carriers, alongside partners such as Microsoft, AWS, IBM, Slalom, and Trace31

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. The platform has improved return on investment from AI initiatives by 47%, reduced agent launch times by 24%, and cut wasted AI spend by 86%1

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. In one case, a customer running an AI agent with an average cost of $0.40 per execution discovered outliers spiking to $70 per run occurring hundreds of times daily, immediately isolating the issue and saving tremendously2

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. A global insurance carrier saved approximately $3 million within its first few months by consolidating multiple agents onto shared capacity reservations rather than reserving them independently2

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. Florin Rotar, Group CTO and Chief AI Officer at Atos, stated that Ascerta has been instrumental in delivering measurable business value and giving his team the visibility and control needed to scale AI initiatives with confidence1

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Why CIOs and CFOs Need This Now

Enterprise AI has moved from experimentation to a material line item on balance sheets, making it critical for CIOs and CFOs to track AI costs and understand which initiatives justify more investment1

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. Ramana Khanna, managing director of Dell Technologies Capital, noted that most enterprises are moving beyond broad AI experimentation and focusing investments on what delivers measurable business value, making Ascerta's visibility and rigor essential for understanding what works, optimizing spending, and scaling successful AI initiatives3

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. Ascerta currently employs 15 people and plans to nearly triple its headcount to roughly 40 by the end of 20272

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. As AI spending continues to grow, organizations need tools that go beyond vanity metrics to track AI business value and ensure every dollar spent on AI investments translates into tangible business outcomes.