Dili discloses $15M Series A for capital-project compliance AI

Dili disclosed a $15 million Series A on July 30, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Brick & Mortar Ventures and Allianz, for its AI-powered labor-compliance software targeting construction, energy and infrastructure projects. Co-founder and CEO Anand Chaturvedi said the New York company has grown more than 500% since the round closed six months ago, and Dili has now announced at least $18.6 million in total funding.

Anand Chaturvedi @metanand https://x.com/metanand disclosed a $15 million Series A for Dili https://www.dili.com/ on July 30th, roughly six months after the financing closed. Khosla Ventures https://www.khoslaventures.com/ led the round, with Y Combinator https://www.ycombinator.com/ , Brick & Mortar Ventures https://brickmortar.vc/home and Allianz participating, Chaturvedi announced on X https://x.com/metanand/status/2082846615472140649?s=46 . https://x.com/metanand/status/2082846615472140649?s=46 https://x.com/metanand/status/2082846615472140649?s=46 Chaturvedi said Dili had grown more than 500% during the six months since the round, without defining whether that figure referred to revenue, customers, projects or another metric. Dili has now announced at least $18.6 million in funding, including the $3.6 million that TechCrunch reported in February 2024 https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/19/dili-wants-to-automate-due-diligence-with-ai/ . The New York company is using the funding to pursue a markedly different market from the one its founders entered three years ago. Chaturvedi, Brian Fernandez https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfernandez1 and Stephanie Song initially built Dili to automate due diligence for private equity and venture capital teams after working together at Coinbase. Dili now sells AI-powered labor-compliance software and monitoring services for construction, energy, infrastructure, data centers and advanced manufacturing projects. From deal rooms to construction sites Chaturvedi's background helps explain the shift toward regulated workflows. Y Combinator lists him https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dili as Dili's co-founder and CEO and says he built know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering systems at Coinbase, led engagement work credited with adding $50 million in revenue, and previously conducted machine-learning research at Apple. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in machine learning from Georgia Tech. Fernandez, Dili's other active founder, is a former Coinbase engineer and University of Rochester graduate. Dili joined Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch with a product that read financial documents, assembled investment memos and flagged risks in deal data rooms. The current product applies that document-processing approach to certified payroll reports, wage determinations, apprenticeship records and subcontractor documentation. Dili says its platform accepts payroll files in PDF, Excel and CSV formats, checks worker classifications and pay against prevailing-wage requirements and SAM.gov data, tracks apprenticeship ratios, and generates audit-ready reports. Dili also offers full-service monitoring and retroactive reviews, putting software alongside compliance specialists for customers that cannot rely on automation alone. That combination is central to Chaturvedi's pitch to "reinvent professional services for capital projects." Construction compliance involves inconsistent contractor records and large document volumes, making it suitable for AI-assisted ingestion. The final wage, hours and tax-credit calculations still need deterministic rules, source records and human review because an incorrect result can create financial liability. Compliance has become a financing risk The market Dili has moved into carries higher stakes than routine payroll administration. The Internal Revenue Service https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/prevailing-wage-and-apprenticeship-requirements says developers can increase the base value of certain clean-energy tax incentives by five times when they satisfy prevailing-wage and registered-apprenticeship requirements. Taxpayers must retain records showing that workers employed by contractors and subcontractors were paid the required rates and that apprenticeship rules were met. Separately, the Department of Labor https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/66-dbra requires contractors on covered federally funded or assisted construction projects to pay locally prevailing wages and submit weekly certified payroll records. Those requirements turn fragmented payroll data into a problem for project owners, developers, contractors, investors and tax-equity providers. Dili says it has processed more than $1 billion in gross wages, tracked 4.7 million labor hours and reviewed 13,837 payroll reports across more than 700 projects. It also claims customers have protected more than $1 billion in funding and tax credits using the platform. Those figures are self-reported, and Dili does not publish revenue or pricing. The Series A gives Dili additional capital to move deeper into a market that already includes certified-payroll specialist LCPtracker https://lcptracker.com/ and construction payroll platforms such as Miter https://www.miter.com/human-capital-management/payroll/certified-payroll/ . Brick & Mortar Ventures' participation adds a backer focused specifically on software and hardware for architecture, engineering and construction. Dili's repositioning is a bet that AI companies can build larger businesses by owning narrow, consequential workflows instead of selling general-purpose document analysis. For Dili, the wedge is the payroll record that determines whether a capital project keeps its federal funding or enhanced tax credit.