Pay-i

Pay-i: AI Cost Observability & Governance Platform

Pay-i is AI cost observability and governance platform tracking spend across LLM providers. Enterprise AI spend is opaque — usage scatters across vendors, teams, and applications, with no central observability. Pay-i's pitch is the OpenTelemetry of AI costs: track every token, allocate to the right cost center, alert on anomalies, and let finance partner with engineering on AI ROI.

Key Features

• AI cost observability and governance platform tracking spend across LLM providers
• Founded in 2024 by Travis Lowdermilk (ex-Microsoft) and Kavik Shah
• Approximately $4.5M seed led by Khosla Ventures
• Tracks token usage and spend across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta Llama, and self-hosted models
• Budget controls, alerts, and per-team or per-application allocation
• Detailed analytics on which agents, features, and users drive cost
• Used by enterprises rolling out generative AI where uncontrolled spend is a procurement blocker

Ideal Use Case

Engineering and finance teams at enterprises rolling out generative AI across multiple teams and applications — where shadow AI spend, runaway agent costs, and lack of per-team cost allocation are blocking broader rollout.

Why Use Pay-i

Enterprise AI spend is opaque — usage scatters across vendors, teams, and applications, with no central observability. Pay-i's pitch is the OpenTelemetry of AI costs: track every token, allocate to the right cost center, alert on anomalies, and let finance partner with engineering on AI ROI.

FAQ

Q: Who founded Pay-i? A: Travis Lowdermilk (ex-Microsoft) and Kavik Shah co-founded Pay-i in 2024.

Q: How much has Pay-i raised? A: Approximately $4.5M seed led by Khosla Ventures.

Q: What does Pay-i do? A: Pay-i is the AI cost observability and governance platform — tracking token usage and spend across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta Llama, and self-hosted models with budget controls, alerts, and per-team allocation.

Q: Why do enterprises need Pay-i? A: Without central observability, AI spend scatters across vendors, teams, and applications, and finance cannot allocate cost to ROI. Pay-i gives finance and engineering a shared view of spend down to the agent, feature, and user level.

Q: Pay-i vs LangSmith vs Helicone? A: LangSmith and Helicone focus on tracing and debugging. Pay-i focuses specifically on cost observability, budget governance, and finance reporting — adjacent but distinct.

tl;dr

Pay-i is the AI cost observability and governance platform — tracks token usage and spend across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta Llama, and self-hosted models. Khosla Ventures-backed; ~$4.5M seed. Built for enterprises where uncontrolled AI spend is a procurement blocker.

Related

Looking for more options? Browse the AI Infrastructure directory or read our best AI infrastructure tools listicle. Pay-i is also tracked on Crunchbase.