Pay-i, a startup building an ROI-intelligence platform for Generative AI (GenAI), today announced a $4.9 million seed funding round co-led by Fuse Partners and Tola Capital, with participation from Firestreak, Pear VC, Gaia Ventures, and several Fortune 100 angel investors.
The platform addresses a growing challenge in the enterprise GenAI market: quantifying and forecasting business returns from AI deployments. While corporate GenAI spending is increasing rapidly, most teams still measure performance using technical metrics like token counts and latency, which fail to capture business value. Pay-i enables finance, product, and engineering teams to tie every model call, prompt, and token to outcomes such as revenue impact, customer satisfaction, or operational efficiency.
Using Pay-i, teams can assign explicit monetary or time-based values to KPIs, compare performance across models, agents, or prompts, and identify the strongest-performing use cases. A built-in forecasting engine projects these returns, allowing companies to make decisions on which features to scale or sunset—before production rollout.
CEO and co-founder David Tepper, a former Microsoft executive with nearly two decades of experience, including leading Azure’s internal GenAI adoption strategy, stated: “The C-suite doesn’t need another usage chart – they need proof and a forecast. Pay-i quantifies today’s value and predicts tomorrow’s gains, allowing teams to invest with confidence.”
Pay-i’s co-founders include CTO Doron Holan, who spent 27 years at Microsoft and contributed to key components of Windows and Azure, and COO Erik Winters, an experienced operator in early-stage SaaS and fintech companies.
Early customers are using the platform to A/B test GenAI-enhanced features like AI-generated reports and support copilots, assigning dollar values to performance improvements such as reduced task time or increased revenue conversion. Pay-i tracks changes in production and forecasts downstream impact.
The team emphasizes that current GenAI billing structures and workflows—such as token-based pricing and multimodal agents—make ROI calculation more complex than traditional software. Pay-i aims to close this visibility gap with high-fidelity observability tools.
The announcement comes amid broader enterprise adoption of GenAI. IDC projects that spending will exceed $632 billion by 2028, yet 72% of CIOs identify ROI forecasting as a key barrier.
Investors say Pay-i’s platform meets this emerging need. “Pay-i transforms GenAI from a black box into a measurable, optimizable system,” said Sheila Gulati, Managing Director at Tola Capital. John Connors, Operating Partner at Fuse Partners and former Microsoft CFO, added: “This platform enables a shift from blind spending to strategic investment.”
The funding will support product development and expand go-to-market efforts. Pay-i is now generally available. As Tepper concluded: “The companies that treat GenAI as an economic strategy—not just a technical one—will win this decade.”
