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Pay-i is now Ascerta. Announced on September 30, 2026, the rebrand came with an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital. The company says it is broadening its focus from AI cost management to “Enterprise AI Management”: connecting AI spending and adoption with business outcomes.

What changed, and who is backing Ascerta?

Ascerta’s September 30 announcement describes the company as formerly known as Pay-i and says Dell Technologies Capital led the $18 million Series A. Hitachi Ventures, BGV, Wipro Ventures, and existing investors FUSE, Tola Capital, and Gaia Ventures also participated. Ascerta’s announcement puts total funding at $22.9 million. Ascerta’s announcement and GeekWire’s September 30 report agree on the headline round and total-funding figures; GeekWire also reports a $4.9 million seed round in May 2025.

Ascerta’s same-day blog uses slightly different rounded figures: $18.1 million for the Series A and $23 million in total funding. The available accounts do not explain the discrepancy, so the difference is best treated as reporting or rounding variation rather than a separately established transaction. The blog gives those figures.

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GeekWire reports that Ascerta is based in Bellevue, Washington, and was founded in 2024 by Microsoft veterans David Tepper, Doron Holan, and Erik Winters. It says Pay-i launched in May 2025.

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What does Ascerta say its software does?

The company says its platform connects to enterprise AI in use, including internally built applications and tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Salesforce Agentforce, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Codex. Ascerta says it tracks adoption by person, team, and tool, then connects AI use cases and costs to business KPIs. These are the company’s descriptions of its offering, not independently tested performance findings. Ascerta’s announcement

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That positioning moves beyond a view of AI as only a technology expense: Ascerta’s stated goal is to help organizations assess which initiatives merit expansion by relating use and costs to business measures. The announcement does not establish how accurately or consistently the products attribute business results to AI.

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What customer outcomes has Ascerta reported?

Ascerta says it works with Atos, Wipro, and global insurance carriers. In its 2026 materials, the company reports a 47% improvement in ROI on AI initiatives, a 24% reduction in agent launch times, and 86% less wasted AI spend. The announcement does not provide methodology for these figures, and the available coverage does not independently verify them; they should be read as company-reported customer claims, not proven results for prospective customers. Ascerta’s customer-outcomes page

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David Tepper, Ascerta’s CEO and co-founder, said, “The market is full of meaningless vanity metrics,” in the company announcement. Atos Group CTO and Chief AI Officer Florin Rotar said, “That requires measurable business value, not just technical capability.” Rotar’s statement is a customer testimonial, not independent validation of the reported metrics. Ascerta’s announcement

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What the announcement does—and does not—establish

The rebrand and funding give Ascerta a larger public profile for a product category it calls Enterprise AI Management. The company’s stated proposition is to connect enterprise AI costs and adoption with KPIs, while offering distinct tools for portfolio-level measurement, coding agents, and provisioned capacity.

The announcement and GeekWire’s coverage establish the reported financing and the company’s positioning, but they do not demonstrate that Ascerta’s products improve AI returns or reduce waste in general. There is also no independently verified industry statistic in the cited coverage establishing how broadly enterprises struggle to prove AI ROI. Organizations evaluating the software would need to assess its own coverage of their AI tools, the granularity of its cost data, the way it attributes outcomes to KPIs, and whether it fits their infrastructure and workflows.

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