Problem

Dili addresses the high-cost, highly manual compliance burden facing federally funded construction, energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing projects. Prevailing-wage, apprenticeship, and certified-payroll requirements are spread across contractors, subcontractors, payroll records, project systems, and changing government rules; teams often rely on spreadsheets and manual review, creating missed violations, audit findings, penalties, and potential clawbacks of funding or tax credits. The killer use case is monitoring a portfolio of federally funded projects early enough to prevent compliance failures: Dili’s case-study material says a top-10 solar developer uncovered 1,393 violations and more than $100,000 in hidden penalty exposure across 14 projects in one week.

The economic pain is especially acute because the underlying projects can be worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars in public funding and tax credits depend on meeting labor-compliance rules. Dili also originated around investment due diligence, where firms spend weeks reviewing data rooms and preparing high-stakes underwriting and investment memos, but its current positioning centers on compliance automation for the built world.

Product / Service

Dili is an AI-powered compliance-automation platform delivered as software plus compliance expertise. Customers can upload payroll data, connect payroll and project-management systems, and use feeds such as SAM.gov; Dili’s AI converts unstructured documents into structured data, while a deterministic rules engine checks wage rates, apprentice ratios, fringe benefits, and other requirements. It then provides risk scoring, exception queues, real-time monitoring, and audit-ready reports rather than forcing teams to reconcile spreadsheets manually.

The delivery model is designed to be low-friction for contractors and project owners: the company advertises drag-and-drop payroll uploads, integrations including ADP and Acumatica, hands-on training, and end-to-end monitoring backed by former Department of Labor and EPC compliance experts. The benefit is increased compliance-manager capacity, earlier detection of violations, and protection of federal funding and tax credits; Dili also supports diligence and portfolio-review workflows for investors and financial institutions evaluating project compliance.

Market

Dili competes in vertical AI and regtech for regulated physical industries, with its clearest beachhead in U.S. construction, clean energy, infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and federally funded projects. Adjacent competitors include LCPtracker, which documents prevailing wages, tracks apprentices, and validates federal Davis-Bacon payroll, and Payroll4Construction, which provides construction payroll, prevailing-wage support, and certified reports. Dili’s differentiation is the combination of AI document understanding, deterministic compliance rules, cross-project monitoring, and investment-grade diligence rather than payroll processing alone.

The company is operating commercially rather than appearing pre-revenue. Public evidence says its software was being used at about 700 projects, while Dili and Y Combinator materials say it has supported compliance tied to more than $1 billion in federal funding and delivered diligence and red-flag analysis across more than 3,000 deals. It has raised a reported $15 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, with the funding announcement describing $21.7 million raised overall; a third-party estimate puts 2024 revenue at approximately $1.4 million, although that revenue figure is not an audited company disclosure.