Dill wants you paid on time.

Here is a thing that is true and slightly ridiculous: a construction distributor can sell half a million dollars of pipe, valves, and fittings to a contractor it has known for fifteen years, and then spend the next ninety days trying to get the contractor to actually pay for the pipe. The pipe is delivered. The pipe is installed. Water is flowing through the pipe. And the invoice for the pipe is sitting in a shoebox on a job trailer, unpaid, because somebody needs to sign something, and the somebody is on a roof.

This is the problem Dill decided to work on. It is not a glamorous problem. Nobody starts a company because they are passionate about days sales outstanding. But it is a large problem, it is a real problem, and - crucially - it is a problem that distributors will pay money to make go away. That last part is the whole thing. A lot of startups solve problems that are interesting but that nobody will pay for. Dill picked a problem that is dull but expensive, which, if you are building a business rather than a hobby, is the correct trade.

What Dill actually is

Dill is a San Francisco fintech company, founded in 2022 and put through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch. Its customers are the wholesalers and distributors who sell the physical stuff of construction - plumbing, HVAC, PVF, industrial supply - to contractors. Its product is, in the plainest terms, the software that gets those distributors paid.

That software comes in a few pieces, and the pieces are arranged in the order that money actually moves. First, a distributor has to decide whether to extend credit to a new contractor at all, which historically means a paper credit application, phoned-in trade references, and a fax to a bank. Dill turns that into an online form with automated bank-reference checks, trade-reference outreach, and credit-bureau pulls, and quotes an implementation window of two to four weeks. Then, once the contractor is buying, Dill sends the statements, chases the reminders, and reconciles the cash as it lands. And when a contractor won't pay, Dill tracks the lien deadlines and mails the preliminary notices - the legal machinery that construction suppliers have always been entitled to use and have mostly avoided because the paperwork is miserable.

The connective tissue underneath all of this is a white-labeled payment portal. It is PCI-compliant, it takes ACH and cards, and it wears the distributor's brand rather than Dill's. This is a deliberate choice and a smart one: the distributor keeps the customer relationship, and Dill keeps the plumbing.

The moat is the money

There is a line in Dill's own materials that is easy to skim past and worth stopping on: distributors report that more than 80% of their payments run through the platform. Consider what that means. Once four out of every five dollars a distributor collects flow through your software, you are no longer a vendor the distributor is evaluating. You are the accounts-receivable department's muscle memory. Ripping you out would mean retraining the people who chase the checks, re-integrating the ERP, and re-explaining a new portal to every contractor who pays. Switching costs, in other words, stop being a slide in a pitch deck and become a fact of the org chart.

This is the quietly good thing about building software that touches transactions. You do not have to argue that you are indispensable. You just have to sit in the path of the money long enough that removing you becomes more expensive than keeping you. Dill sells the promise of faster cash - customers cite roughly 20% faster payment and about 20 hours a week returned to sales and service - and collects, as a byproduct, a position that is genuinely hard to dislodge.

The founder, and the pivot

Dill's founder and CEO is Catherine Jiang, and she is a second-time founder, which shows up in the shape of the company. She previously co-founded SiteTrace, a material-ordering tool for the mechanical, HVAC, and plumbing trades, and did a stint as a product manager at Yelp. Her earlier B2B commerce venture was acquired. So when she came back to build Dill, she came back to a corner of the economy she already understood: distributors, trades, and the unglamorous logistics of who owes whom.

The interesting wrinkle is that Dill did not start where it is now. Early on, the company aimed its digital-invoicing pitch at foodservice distributors - the people who deliver produce and dry goods to restaurants. The same core problem applies there: distributors extend credit, deliver on terms, and struggle to collect. But the customers who pulled hardest turned out to be in construction supply, and Dill followed them. This is worth naming clearly, because "pivot" gets used as a euphemism for panic. This was not that. The problem stayed identical - distributors cannot get paid on time - and only the industry changed. Following your most demanding customers is discipline, not drift.

Why this industry, and why now

The broad thesis behind Dill is one a lot of B2B fintech people have converged on, which does not make it wrong. Consumer payments got a decade of design attention - checkout got beautiful, splitting a dinner bill became a tapped screen - while the middle of the economy kept mailing paper statements. A distributor moving tens of millions of dollars of building materials a year still, in many cases, runs collections on a spreadsheet and a person's memory. There is a large gap between how sophisticated these businesses are operationally and how primitive their financial tooling is, and gaps like that are where software gets to arrive late and still matter.

Construction adds a specific twist that makes it more than a generic AR play: lien rights. Suppliers who furnish materials to a job have a legal claim against the property if they aren't paid - a genuinely powerful piece of leverage. But exercising it means tracking preliminary-notice windows and filing deadlines across dozens of jobs in multiple jurisdictions, which is exactly the sort of deadline-driven paperwork that falls through the cracks. By automating the notices and the alerts, Dill hands suppliers a right they technically already had but rarely used. That is a nice place for a product to live: not selling something new, but activating something dormant.

The distribution trick

Selling software to distributors one at a time is slow. Dill has leaned instead on the buying groups and member networks that already organize the industry - Affiliated Distributors, IMARK Plumbing, Blue Hawk - and on credit-management bodies like NACM, where it appears among preferred providers, and NAED, which featured it as a new member. These groups exist to negotiate on behalf of their members and to vet vendors, so getting adopted by the group is a way to get in front of hundreds of distributors with one relationship. It is the B2B equivalent of getting shelf space, and it is a sensible way for a small company to punch above its headcount.

The other half of the go-to-market is the integration list above. A distributor's ERP is the system of record for its entire business, and no distributor is going to replace it to try a payments startup. Dill's answer is to sit on top of the ERP rather than in place of it - connecting to Prophet 21, Eclipse, and the rest - so adoption is additive rather than a migration project. Making yourself easy to adopt is not a marketing detail; it is the product.

What it costs, what it's worth

Here the file gets appropriately hazy, and it is worth being honest about that. Dill's disclosed funding is modest and early - Y Combinator backing plus a seed, totaling something in the neighborhood of $630,000 by the figures attached to its records, with a small later tranche dated to August 2023. Third-party trackers float larger numbers - one estimates roughly $5 million in annual recurring revenue and a $15 million valuation - but those are external estimates, not company disclosures, and they should be read as approximate rather than confirmed. What is safe to say is that Dill is a small, early-stage company selling into a very large and very unmodernized market. Whether it becomes a big company depends on the same thing it always does: how many distributors it can get to route their money through it, and how well it holds them once they do.

The short version

Dill is a bet that the least exciting sentence in a distributor's week - "have we been paid yet?" - is worth building a company around. The wager is that if you make credit approval fast, payment easy, and collections automatic, and if you route it all through software the distributor's customers actually use, you end up holding a position that is quietly very sticky. It is early, the numbers are modest and partly estimated, and the market is enormous and stubborn. But the problem is real, the customers pay to solve it, and the founder has done a version of this before. For a company whose logo is a sprig of an herb, that is a fairly grown-up thesis.