Startups & Funding
Dili raises $21.7M to bring AI compliance to the infrastructure boom
Dili, a startup that automates compliance checks for U.S. infrastructure projects, said Thursday it had raised $15 million in a Series A round, bringing its total funding to $21.7 million.
Dili builds AI-powered compliance software for companies working on U.S. infrastructure projects, and the company said Thursday it had closed a $15 million Series A round. The round follows a $6.7 million seed round, bringing total capital raised to $21.7 million. Khosla Ventures led the Series A, with participation from Allianz, Rebel Fund, Brick and Mortar Ventures’ Darren Bechtel, and Y Combinator’s Garry Tan. Dili was previously part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 batch.
The startup targets a specific tangle of rules that govern construction projects receiving federal funding. Co-founder and CEO Anand Chaturvedi points to Davis-Bacon rules — which let the U.S. Department of Labor set prevailing wages for certain projects — as an example. A separate set of prevailing wage and apprenticeship (PWA) rules applies to clean-energy projects funded under the IRA, with various other OSHA (workplace-safety regulator) or EPA (environmental regulator) rules in effect depending on the type of work. “Non-compliance can result in millions of dollars of fines for those projects,” Chaturvedi said, adding that checking all incoming information rather than sampling it is what makes the approach powerful.
Given those stakes, Chaturvedi says Dili’s architecture is built to keep LLM-based fuzziness out of the final product: current AI models are used only in the company’s data layer, the engine that turns unstructured documents into structured data. A deterministic system then sorts that data according to the complex-but-static compliance rules. When it works, he said, a task that used to take a full day can now be dispatched in minutes.
Dili’s software is already used at about 700 projects, ranging from manufacturing facilities to data centers. Roughly half of those projects use Dili as an in-house tool, Chaturvedi said, while the other half outsource their entire compliance process to the company under a contractor model. Dili supports both types of contract, though Chaturvedi expects the industry to shift further toward the software model over time as more companies bring the work in-house.
Why it matters
As “AI for compliance” pitches proliferate, Dili is betting that the physical infrastructure boom itself needs a narrower, rules-bound layer of AI rather than a general-purpose one.