Pay-i, a value-intelligence platform, announced $4.9 million in seed funding to address enterprise spending on GenAI. The round was co-led by Fuse Partners and Tola Capital, with participation from Firestreak, Pear VC, Gaia Capital, and angel investors from Fortune 100 companies.
Today, most teams still measure the success of their AI initiatives in token counts or latency, metrics that don’t capture business value or justify costs. Pay-i gives product, finance, and engineering leaders a real-time dashboard that links every model call, prompt, and token to measurable business outcomes for specific use cases, like revenue growth, task completion time, or CSAT uplift.
Users can assign explicit dollar or time values to KPIs, compare multiple versions of a use case, and instantly see which model, agent, or prompt delivers the strongest return. A built-in forecasting engine projects those returns.
“The C-suite doesn’t need another usage chart – they need proof and a forecast,” said David Tepper, co-founder and CEO of Pay-i. “Pay-i pinpoints which GenAI use cases create net-new value today, quantifies that value in dollars or hours, and predicts how it will compound tomorrow. Leaders can double down on winners and reach ROI faster.”
Enterprise teams use Pay-i to assign hard dollar values to GenAI-enhanced features, like customer support copilots or AI-generated reports, then A/B test different agents or prompts in production. Pay-i tracks how each change impacts task completion time, revenue conversion, or KPIs, like CSAT, and forecasts the business impact before full rollout.
Tepper previously spent 19 years at Microsoft and was involved in Azure’s internal GenAI consumption strategy. His first patent on GenAI dates back to 2011. He’s since briefed F500 boards, universities, members of Congress, and UN delegations on AI economics. Tepper co-founded Pay-i alongside CTO Doron Holan, who spent 27 years at Microsoft and was a core architect for Windows and Azure’s throttling layer, and COO Erik Winters, an operator who scaled early-stage companies across finance and SaaS.
The product reflects what they learned working with the largest cloud buyers in the world: traditional cost tooling stops at usage, while real decision-making happens where cost meets value. That’s especially true in GenAI, where token-based billing, multimodal inputs, reasoning models, and agentic workflows have made unit economics opaque and ROI harder to track than ever.
“With traditional software, we could track exactly how features were used,” added Holan. “But with GenAI, that visibility gets lost. Pay-i closes that gap and shows exactly where value is being created, in real time.”
IDC projects enterprise GenAI investment will top $632 billion by 2028, but 72% of CIOs cite ROI measurement and forecasting as theirtop blocker.
“Generative AI is graduating from pilots to mission-critical production. Enterprises are rolling out knowledge augmentation tools, automated workflows, and starting to create agentic services that re-shape core operations and customer journeys. Scaling and managing this responsibly requires two disciplines: high-fidelity observability of entire GenAI use cases and rigorous focus on the impact of these systems through understanding the unit economics and business KPIs affected,” said Lari Hämäläinen, senior partner at McKinsey.
“Pay-i turns every AI decision into a clear cost-to-value ratio, letting enterprises see, in real time, how model and design choices affect their metrics. This transparency enables businesses to control their AI spend and allocate resources optimally. Pay-i provides a roadmap for the all-important transition to AI,” said Sheila Gulati, managing director at Tola Capital.
With the new funding, Pay-i will accelerate product development and promotion.
