Dili raises $21.7m from Khosla Ventures for AI compliance platform

Dili, a New York-based startup offering an AI-powered compliance platform for the energy, construction and infrastructure sectors, has announced $21.7 million in total funding. The raise comprises a $15 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Allianz, Brick and Mortar Ventures' Darren Bechtel, Y Combinator's Garry Tan, and Rebel Fund.

The company was founded in 2023 by Anand Chaturvedi, who previously held product roles at Coinbase and conducted machine learning research at Apple, and co-founder and CTO Brian Fernandez, also a Coinbase engineering veteran. Their stated aim is to replace the periodic, sample-based audit model operated by the large accountancy firms with continuous, full-dataset monitoring.

What the platform does

Dili's core product automates prevailing wage and apprenticeship compliance, Davis-Bacon Act monitoring and certified payroll review, all of which are mandatory for contractors accessing federal infrastructure funding. Rather than reviewing a representative sample of records every six months, as the company says is standard practice among the Big Four firms, Dili processes 100% of project data on a rolling basis.

The company says it has processed over $1.4 billion in gross wages and 5.2 million labour hours across more than 16,000 certified payroll reports spanning 700-plus projects. It claims to have reduced per-organisation review time from more than seven hours to under five minutes per week. In one cited case, the platform identified $6 million in potential IRS penalty exposure for a single customer before it crystallised, contributing to what the company describes as more than $50 million in fines and clawbacks caught or prevented across its customer base. Named customers include EDF, Radiance, Heelstone and Borea.

Chaturvedi said the traditional audit model was structurally ill-suited to the scale of modern infrastructure contracting. "The first time we ran a look-back on a customer's historical data, we found in four days what would have taken their consultants months to find by sampling, if they'd found it at all," he said.

Market context and competitive positioning

Dili operates at the intersection of regulatory compliance software and AI-driven audit automation, a segment drawing increasing investor attention as US federal infrastructure spending accelerates under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Both programmes carry significant prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements attached to their tax credits and grants, creating a structural compliance burden for project sponsors and contractors.

The traditional market for this work sits with the Big Four accountancy firms and specialist compliance consultancies. A number of well-funded enterprise-software and GovTech startups are also pursuing automated compliance monitoring, though few have publicly disclosed comparable volumes of processed payroll data or named utility-scale energy clients.

Vinod Khosla framed the opportunity in terms of risk at scale: "One missed financial compliance requirement puts hundreds of millions of dollars at risk." The new capital will be deployed across engineering, product and go-to-market hires, and Dili says it intends to expand from its current prevailing wage focus into broader audit and waste detection, encroaching more directly on work the Big Four have historically owned.

Regulatory read-across

The Davis-Bacon Act, which sets prevailing wage floors on federally funded construction, was significantly expanded in scope by IRA and IIJA guidance issued by the US Department of Labor from 2022 onwards. Enforcement scrutiny has increased in parallel, making the compliance window Dili is targeting a live regulatory risk rather than a theoretical one. For UK and European readers, an analogous dynamic is developing around public procurement rules and the growing use of AI auditing tools in infrastructure project finance, though no direct regulatory cross-reference was cited in the source material.

The Series A positions Dili for a growth phase, but the company will need to demonstrate it can scale beyond its current named customer base and broaden its platform scope before it can credibly claim to displace incumbent audit relationships at the enterprise level.