Bellevue, Wash.-based startup Pay-i is rebranding as Ascerta and raising $18 million in new funding to expand its platform beyond AI cost tracking into measuring overall business ROI.
The Series A round was led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures, and existing backers. The fresh capital brings total funding to $22.9 million for the startup, which launched in May 2025 with a $4.9 million seed round.
Ascerta was founded in 2024 by Microsoft veterans David Tepper, Doron Holan, and Erik Winters. Tepper, the CEO, 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 daily.
The company initially emerged from stealth as Pay-i last year with a focus purely on AI cost management. As enterprise adoption accelerated, the founders realized companies were struggling to figure out which tools and agents were actually driving business results — prompting the rebrand and shift toward what Ascerta calls enterprise AI management.
“Pay-i reflected our starting point in AI cost management, but customers increasingly use the platform to understand adoption, measure business outcomes and decide which AI initiatives to scale,” Tepper told GeekWire via email. “Ascerta reflects that broader role in helping enterprises manage their entire AI investment, including its people.”
Enterprise AI tools often hide unexpected costs in sub-token usage or rogue agent runs, Tepper said. In one case, an Ascerta 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 a day.
“They were immediately able to isolate that issue and save tremendously,” Tepper noted.
In another instance, a global insurance carrier used the platform to right-size its AI capacity commitments with a hyperscale cloud provider. By consolidating multiple agents onto shared capacity reservations rather than reserving them independently, the insurer saved approximately $3 million within its first few months.
Ascerta’s platform connects to existing systems and major enterprise AI tools — including Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Salesforce Agentforce, and coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code — to track adoption by person, team, and tool. The startup currently counts Atos, Wipro, and several global financial institutions among its customers.
Ascerta currently employs 15 people and plans to nearly triple its headcount to roughly 40 by the end of 2027.
The startup will use the new capital to expand its platform capabilities, grow its go-to-market and engineering teams, and extend integrations to support every major enterprise AI tool.
https://ift.tt/bogRBZn September 30, 2026 at 12:00PM GeekWire
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