Ascerta, formerly Pay-i, raises $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital for enterprise AI management

Ascerta, formerly Pay-i, raises $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital for enterprise AI management

30 September 2026 — Ascerta, a software company in Bellevue, Washington, announced on 30 September 2026 that it has raised an $18 million Series A and changed its name from Pay-i. The company sells tools that tell large organisations what their use of AI costs, who is using it, and which AI projects are producing a measurable return.

Not yet independently verified. The amount, investors and total rest on the company's own announcement; the outlet repeats them. Customer figures and claims of value delivered are the company's own and have not been checked. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The round

According to the company's announcement, the $18 million Series A was led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, BGV and Wipro Ventures, and from earlier investors FUSE, Tola Capital and Gaia Ventures. The company says the round brings its total funding to $22.9 million.

Ascerta says it will use the money to scale its platform and expand its go-to-market team, to integrate with the major enterprise AI tools, and to widen its scope from AI cost management into what it calls Enterprise AI Management.

What the company does

Ascerta describes three products. Atlas measures the return on AI initiatives across an organisation. Forge tracks how engineering teams use coding agents and what that use costs. Convoy covers GPU capacity. The common idea is a single system in which a chief information officer, finance team or AI lead can see spending, adoption and business value side by side, rather than piecing it together from separate vendor invoices and dashboards.

The rename reflects that shift: the original name described paying for AI, the new positioning is about managing it.

Why it matters for buyers

Many organisations now pay for AI through several routes at once: assistant seats, usage-priced APIs, coding agents billed per task, and cloud GPU time. Bills arrive from different vendors in different units, and few finance teams can say which of those costs produced results. A funded specialist in this area is one sign that AI spend is being treated as its own budget line with its own controls, in the way cloud spend was a decade ago.

What to check

• Which AI vendors and tools it can read usage and cost data from today, and which are only planned.
• How it attributes "value" to an AI project: what data it needs from you, and how much of the result is your own estimate.
• Where usage data, prompts or metadata are stored, and whether prompt content is collected at all.
• Whether it can enforce budgets or only report on them.
• Pricing basis: per seat, per tracked dollar of AI spend, or flat.

Sources

• Ascerta: Ascerta raises $18M to help enterprises maximize AI ROI — 30 September 2026
• The Next Web: Ascerta raises $18M Series A led by Dell to measure enterprise AI ROI — 30 September 2026