Nebuly, a Turin-based startup focused on helping enterprises quantify the financial returns generated by their AI agents, has closed a $21 million Series A funding round. Planven led the investment, with participation from Exor Ventures, Tenacity Capital, TGVG Capital, Fastweb+Vodafone, and CDP Venture Capital's AI and Digital Transition funds.
The company tackles a challenge that increasingly occupies boardroom conversations: determining whether AI investments are actually delivering measurable value. According to co-founder and CEO Francesco Signorato, "Every enterprise is about to face the same question from its board: what is AI actually worth to us? Nebuly exists to answer it."
Many organisations currently rely on superficial metrics—user counts, prompt volumes, response rates—to gauge AI success. Signorato describes this as "tokenmaxxing," a tendency to treat usage itself as the ultimate measure of achievement, divorced from actual business impact. Similarly, hiring decisions tied to presumed productivity improvements from AI often lack supporting evidence that those gains have actually materialised.
The financial stakes are mounting. Uber burned through its entire annual AI budget within just four months of 2026, according to reporting by the Financial Times. Amazon's internal AI project spiralled 860% over budget before the overspend was caught. Meanwhile, enterprise AI expenditures have tripled even as the per-token cost has dropped significantly.
How Nebuly Works
Nebuly's platform aggregates data on what AI agents perform across an organisation—encompassing both employee-facing tools and customer-interaction systems—and correlates that activity with business outcomes.
For internal applications, the system quantifies time freed up, capacity unlocked and fresh responsibilities employees can assume. It also pinpoints which departments extract the most value and where additional training might boost results.
Customer-facing AI assistants are evaluated on revenue influenced and indicators of potential customer retention or upsell opportunities.
Finance departments retain the ability to examine and modify the assumptions underlying the platform's calculations rather than treating outputs as immutable.
Nebuly integrates with custom-built agents and assistants running on Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. The platform can operate on company-owned infrastructure or private cloud environments. Current customers span Oura, Iveco Group, Fastweb+Vodafone, CNH and Zeiss, with contract values in the multiple six-figure range.
From Analytics to ROI
Signorato founded Nebuly in 2022 alongside Julien Roux and Diego Fiori. The company initially concentrated on user analytics for large language models before pivoting toward measuring AI's business value.
Nebuly faces competition in this emerging space. Ascerta secured $18 million from Dell's venture arm in September to link enterprise AI spending with business results. Traditional software vendors are also shifting their pricing models—Zendesk, for instance, is moving toward pay-per-result arrangements.
The company intends to deploy the new funding to strengthen its sales and go-to-market operations across the US and Europe while advancing its platform capabilities.
As organisations transition from AI experimentation to cost scrutiny, demonstrating concrete business contributions from these systems has become increasingly critical.
Source: The Next Web
