Ascerta raises $18 million to measure AI's value

Ascerta is entering a gap that has opened as AI spending has grown. The body notes that most companies have no trouble counting token consumption or lines of AI-generated code, but few can answer which AI projects are actually making money. Traditional FinOps tools, built to show spending on things like cloud infrastructure, are not much use for understanding the business outcomes of an AI agent or coding assistant, according to co-founder and CEO David Tepper.

The company's answer is a single unified system with three parts: Atlas, which measures AI adoption, the value it generates and its return on investment; Forge, which looks at how engineering teams use coding agents and how that affects productivity; and Convoy, which helps companies understand how much computing resources they use for AI so they can consolidate workloads. It connects to widely used enterprise AI tools, and Tepper says it can surface hidden fees, enterprise discounts and sub-token costs that other tools miss.

The round was led by Dell Technologies Capital, with Hitachi Ventures, BGV and Wipro Ventures taking part. Ramana Khanna of Dell Technologies Capital framed the bet as building a system of record for AI value creation, adding that most enterprises are moving beyond broad experimentation toward what delivers measurable business value. The stakes for Ascerta are likely to hinge on whether the results it reports for early customers Atos and Wipro can be repeated across a wider set of enterprises, and on whether finance and AI leaders treat a system of record for AI value as a must-have rather than a nice-to-have.