Dili Raises $21.7 Million to Bring AI Compliance to the Infrastructure Boom

The push to make AI work means bringing significant new data center and power infrastructure online. But these infrastructure projects themselves may also benefit from a dose of AI. On Thursday, Dili, a new AI compliance company, announced $15 million in Series A funding squarely targeting the wave of US infrastructure projects. This round follows a $6.7 million seed round, bringing total fundraising to $21.7 million. The Series A was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Allianz, Rebel Fund, Brick and Mortar Ventures’ Darren Bechtel, and Y Combinator’s Garry Tan. Dili was part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 batch. “AI for compliance” is a common pitch among startups, but Dili focuses on the unique tangle of rules governing construction projects—especially those receiving federal funding. As an example, co-founder and CEO Anand Chaturvedi pointed to Davis-Bacon rules, which allow the Department of Labor to set prevailing wages for certain projects. A separate set of prevailing wage and apprenticeship rules (PWA rules) apply to clean energy projects funded under the IRA, along with various OSHA or EPA regulations depending on the work’s nature. It’s a complex web of overlapping requirements where even small mistakes can be costly. “Non-compliance can result in millions of dollars of fines for those projects,” Chaturvedi explained. “So it’s really powerful to be able to check all the information as it comes in, instead of just sampling data.” Given these high stakes, reliability is paramount. Chaturvedi believes Dili’s architecture prevents any LLM-based fuzziness from creeping into the final product. Contemporary AI models are used only in the data layer, which translates unstructured documents into structured data. From there, a deterministic system sorts data according to complex but static compliance rules. When it works, a task that once took a full day can be completed in minutes. “Imagine being able to read across the entire context of a company’s internal documents, all of their vendors’ documents, all of their ERP information, all of their payroll systems information,” Chaturvedi said, “and then draw out the data that you need specifically for reporting or compliance.” Dili is already making this system work in practice. Chaturvedi says the software is being used on about 700 projects, from manufacturing facilities to data centers. Notably, roughly half of those projects use Dili as an in-house software tool, while the other half outsource the entire compliance process as a contractor model. Dili handles both types, but Chaturvedi anticipates a shift toward the software model in the years ahead. “Software and AI are going to start eating a lot of those professional services workflows, so I think more and more people will start to bring those in house,” Chaturvedi said. “The interesting thing will be how the market itself evolves and where the customer needs go as AI develops.”

via TechCrunch AI