Ascerta: The System of Record for AI Value Creation

Enterprises are making significant capital and talent investments as they move AI from experimentation to production across their organizations. If they aren’t already, they soon will be asking themselves one simple question: Is this AI transformation creating business value?

Boards are asking about ROI. CFOs are scrutinizing AI spend. CIOs are deciding which initiatives deserve additional investment and which should be sunset. AI has become a line item large enough to matter, yet most organizations still lack the infrastructure needed to understand where value is being created and where resources are being wasted.

The Missing Layer in Enterprise AI

Enterprise AI generates no shortage of metrics. Enterprises can count tokens, model calls, agent runs, prompts generated, lines of code written, and countless other signals. But metrics are not outcomes. And activity is not necessarily value.

Over the next decade, enterprises will invest trillions of dollars in AI infrastructure, software, and organizational transformation. Yet most companies still operate AI with surprisingly limited visibility. Leaders need a system that connects AI usage to business outcomes and provides the operational discipline required to scale AI successfully across the enterprise.

That’s Ascerta. And that's why we're excited to announce our investment in Ascerta, formerly known as Pay-i, leading the company's $18 million Series A financing.

From Cost Management to Enterprise AI Management

We initially got to know the company as Pay-i, where the team established itself as a leader in AI cost management. Through thousands of conversations with enterprise leaders, the team recognized that managing AI effectively required a much broader framework and their vision expanded. Organizations needed visibility into three critical dimensions:

Inputs: How employees and systems are using AI, including prompts, workflows, and context.

Activity: What the AI is doing down to highly granular operational and consumption data.

Outcomes: The measurable business impact generated by those interactions.

This evolution led the company to a larger opportunity: Enterprise AI Management.

Rather than just tracking costs, Ascerta helps organizations understand the complete relationship between AI activity and business value. The platform measures AI usage across teams, users, agents, and tools; connects that activity to business outcomes; and helps leaders optimize both spending and adoption.

A Team Built for the Challenge

Before founding Ascerta, David Tepper spent nearly two decades at Microsoft, where he helped lead some of the company's most ambitious platform transitions. Most recently, he was at the center of Microsoft's generative AI initiatives, working firsthand with the challenges enterprises faced as AI moved from research projects into real-world production environments. During that period, he saw organizations rush to deploy copilots, agents, and AI-powered workflows, but then struggle to understand which initiatives were creating real value. That experience became the foundation for Ascerta.

The team combines technical credibility with a practical understanding of how large enterprises operate. They've lived through the complexity of deploying technology at global scale, understand the organizational barriers that often limit adoption, and have built Ascerta to integrate into the systems and processes enterprises already rely on.

Defining a New Category

At DTC, we look for companies building foundational technologies that emerge alongside major platform shifts. We believe Enterprise AI Management will become a core layer of the enterprise software stack. Companies that can clearly measure value will move faster and create sustainable competitive advantages.

Ascerta is exceptionally well positioned to define that market. We're excited to partner with them as they build the system of record for AI value creation.

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