She picked the least digital corner of the economy - the construction supply chain - and decided the paper had to go. Dill is her answer: software that gets contractors and suppliers paid faster.
Catherine Jiang runs Dill, and Dill exists because a contractor somewhere is waiting to get paid. Construction suppliers ship millions of dollars in materials and then chase the money through a maze of paper invoices, mailed preliminary notices, credit applications, and lien deadlines that can quietly erase the right to be paid at all. Jiang's company automates that maze. The pitch is unglamorous and exact: get paid faster, get your week back.
Dill is a Y Combinator company from the Winter 2023 batch, founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco. Today it bills itself as the all-in-one accounts receivable platform for construction suppliers - online payments, auto-reconciliation, credit applications, and lien rights management bundled into one system that plugs into the ERPs these companies already run.
The interesting part is that Dill did not start in construction. It started in food. The first version of the company served foodservice distributors drowning in the same problem: hundreds of invoices a day, restaurants paying late, proof-of-delivery slips going missing because the whole process still ran on paper. Jiang knew the territory. She had been a product manager at Yelp and, by her own cheerful admission, is "a huge foodie." The herb the company is named after is a tell.
Then the company followed the pain. The cash-flow gap that hurts a food distributor hurts a building-materials supplier far more, and the construction industry layers on a legal apparatus - liens, notices, waivers - that turns a missed deadline into a lost payment. Dill moved toward the bigger wound. The name stayed; the customer changed.
None of this is Jiang's first rodeo, and she will tell you so in those words. She is a second-time founder. Her first company, SiteTrace, where she was co-founder and CTO/product, was acquired by BuildCentrix. B2B commerce, she says, is her bread and butter. The second time around she is doing it with a team of engineers and founding salespeople and a thesis that the most boring industries hide the best software problems.
Online payment portals, ACH and credit card, branded payment pages, reminders, and auto-reconciliation - so a supplier's money stops living in a stack of unopened envelopes.
Automated preliminary notices, lien deadline tracking, and lien-waiver management. In construction, the paperwork is the difference between getting paid and writing it off.
Customizable credit application forms, trade and bank reference outreach, and credit bureau integration - turning a slow, manual underwriting ritual into a workflow.
This isn't my first rodeo.Catherine Jiang, on founding a company for the second time
The cross-disciplinary major that mixes computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology - a degree built for people who like the seams between fields.
Learned consumer and local-business product up close. Also, by her telling, leaned all the way into being a foodie.
Her first B2B commerce startup. It was acquired by BuildCentrix - the exit that turned "founder" into a repeatable habit.
Starts by bringing invoicing and payments online for the food supply chain.
Dill launches publicly and raises a seed round to build out the platform.
Refocuses Dill on construction suppliers - AR, payments, credit, and lien rights in one platform.
There is a pattern in Catherine Jiang's career, and it is not the one founders usually chase. Twice now she has aimed at industries nobody puts on a pitch-deck mood board: building materials, food distribution. These are businesses run on relationships, phone calls, faxes, and filing cabinets. They are enormous. They are also exactly the kind of place where a well-built piece of software lands like a forklift.
Construction suppliers are a good example of the trade. They float credit to contractors the way a bank would, but without a bank's tooling. They depend on a body of lien law that protects their right to payment - but only if the notices and waivers go out on time. Miss a date and the leverage evaporates. Dill's job is to make the deadline impossible to miss and the payment easy to make.
That is the whole bet: take the least digital part of a giant industry, automate the parts that quietly bankrupt people, and let cash move faster. Jiang's Symbolic Systems training shows up here - she is comfortable in the messy space between how an industry says it works and how it actually works. The first product taught her the shape of the problem in food. The pivot suggests she found a deeper version of it pouring concrete.