dili

Dili built their initial product for contractors and project managers in federally-funded infrastructure projects who needed to prove prevailing wage compliance to secure government contracts. ​​‌‌‌‌‌‌‌​‌‌​​‌​​​​​​‌‌​‌‌‌​​​‌‌Their core assumption was that companies managing large construction, energy, and manufacturing projects would pay for automation that reduced the manual burden of tracking labor compliance across complex regulatory requirements. Early validation came quickly: Dili discovered that their customers faced genuine pain—prevailing wage documentation was time-consuming, error-prone, and critical for accessing federal funding. The company's ability to help customers secure over $1 billion in federal funding became their strongest signal that they'd identified the right problem. Rather than discovering a completely different audience, Dili appears to have validated their initial targeting by expanding horizontally across similar industries—energy, infrastructure, datacenters, and advanced manufacturing—all sharing the same compliance-heavy, federally-funded project structures. This expansion suggests their core thesis about the target buyer held up well, with the market proving larger than initially anticipated across multiple physical industries facing identical regulatory challenges.