It’s clear that making artificial intelligence a reality will require a massive expansion of data centers and power infrastructure. But interestingly, those very same construction projects might need a helping hand from AI themselves. On Thursday, a new compliance startup called Dili—built specifically for the wave of U.S. infrastructure projects—announced it had secured $15 million in Series A funding. This follows a $6.7 million seed round, bringing the company’s total funding to $21.7 million. The Series A was led by Khosla Ventures, with additional backing from Allianz, Rebel Fund, Brick and Mortar Ventures’ Darren Bechtel, and Y Combinator’s Garry Tan. Dili was originally part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 cohort.

While “AI for compliance” is a common pitch among startups these days, Dili zeroes in on the especially tangled web of regulations surrounding construction projects, particularly those that receive any form of federal funding. As an example, co-founder and CEO Anand Chaturvedi pointed to the Davis-Bacon rules, which let the Department of Labor set prevailing wages for certain projects. A separate set of prevailing wage and apprenticeship (PWA) rules applies to clean energy projects funded under the Inflation Reduction Act, with additional OSHA or EPA requirements depending on the type of work. These overlapping regulations create a complex compliance landscape, and even minor errors can be extremely 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 the high stakes, reliability is paramount, but Chaturvedi is confident that Dili’s architecture prevents any LLM-related imprecision from affecting the final output. The company uses contemporary AI models only in its data layer, where they convert unstructured documents into structured data. From there, a deterministic system processes the data according to the complex—but static—compliance rules. When everything works as intended, a task that used to take an entire day can now be completed in just a few 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, and then draw out the data that you need specifically for reporting or compliance,” Chaturvedi said.

Dili is already putting this system into practice. According to Chaturvedi, the software is currently being used on “about 700 projects,” ranging from manufacturing plants to data centers. Interestingly, roughly half of those projects are using Dili as an in-house software tool, while the other half outsource the entire compliance process to the company on a contractor basis. Dili can handle both types of arrangements, though Chaturvedi expects the industry to gradually move toward the software model. “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,” he said. “The interesting thing will be how the market itself evolves and where the customer needs go as AI develops.”