The Story
Mid-Stride in the Dirtiest Industry in Tech
Lily Shen spent two years at Niantic helping grow Pokemon Go - tracking data on millions of players hunting fictional creatures through city streets. Then she looked around at those same city streets and noticed something different: the trash. Not metaphorically. Literally. A $100 billion US waste management industry running on paper invoices, phone calls, and guesswork, with no data layer, no transparency, and zero tech infrastructure. In 2019, she did something about it.
She founded what would become Dimension - initially under the name Trash Warrior, a scrappy B2C service for on-demand junk removal. Within a few years, the company had pivoted to enterprise B2B, rebranded, raised $19.5M, landed Amazon, Hyatt, Instacart, Hilton, and Holiday Inn as clients, and built a platform serving roughly 300 cities across the United States. Dimension's pitch is straightforward: waste management should work like any other enterprise software category. Schedule it. Track it. Get data on it. Make it sustainable.
The mission statement is ambitious without being vague: Lily wants to raise the US national recycling rate from 35% to 75%. That's not a rounding error - it's a structural transformation of how America handles its waste streams, from hazardous materials to e-waste, medical disposal to dumpster rentals. The platform provides scheduling, waste diversion data, and regulatory compliance tools for businesses that need more than a once-a-week pickup.
Before the Dumpster
A Resume That Defies Any Single Label
Before Dimension, Lily's career reads like someone who couldn't stop being curious about systems. She started at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston as a Senior Research Assistant from 2011 to 2013 - crunching economic data shortly after graduating Princeton. Then Harvard. Then McKinsey as a Summer Associate in 2014. Then a stint as Entrepreneur in Residence at IDG Capital Partners in Beijing, where she organized an international development conference.
She joined Deloitte as a Senior Consultant in 2015, then crossed into tech as China Initiative Lead at Opendoor in 2017, responsible for attracting retail buyers and building Chinese business partnerships for the real estate disruptor. By April 2017 she was at Niantic - the company behind Pokemon Go - as Data Science Lead, then Product Manager through April 2019. She was working on growth and machine learning for one of the most-downloaded games in history when she decided to start a waste management company.
The thread connecting all of it: complex systems, data analysis, and the conviction that digital infrastructure could transform industries that had never thought they needed it. Waste management was just the most obvious gap she saw.
Building Dimension
From Trash Warrior to Enterprise Platform
The company's origin story starts with a name that says everything about where it was: Trash Warrior. Founded in March 2019, it began as an on-demand residential and commercial waste removal service - "an Uber for waste removal," as early press described it. The first funding round came in February 2020. Then, in late 2022, Lily made two big moves simultaneously: she raised an $8M Seed round led by AltaIR Capital, with 500 Global, Lightspeed, Primavera Capital, and other investors participating - and she rebranded the company to Dimension.
The rebrand wasn't cosmetic. Dimension reflects a different kind of company: one focused on waste diversion data, sustainability reporting, and the full spectrum of commercial waste needs. The platform handles recurring waste services, on-demand removal, medical waste disposal, e-waste recycling, hazardous waste handling, solar panel disposal, property cleanouts, and dumpster rentals. It serves healthcare systems, hotels, retailers, and e-commerce operations. It includes an AI price quoter for instant quotes.
The enterprise client list is a credibility statement: Amazon, Instacart, Imperfect Foods, Hyatt, Hilton, Holiday Inn, Tuft & Needle. These are companies with complex, multi-location waste needs and regulatory compliance requirements. They're not looking for a better garbage app. They're looking for data on their waste streams, proof of diversion rates, and a single vendor who can handle the complexity.
The Bigger Picture
35% to 75%: The Bet She's Making
The US national recycling rate sits around 35%. Lily Shen has set 75% as Dimension's north star. The gap isn't primarily a consumer behavior problem - it's an infrastructure and data problem. Waste haulers don't share data. Companies don't know what happens to their recyclables. There's no single source of truth for waste diversion. Dimension's platform is built on the premise that transparency and measurement will drive the change that regulation and education alone haven't managed.
She's also building at a moment when sustainability reporting is moving from voluntary to mandatory in many industries. Companies increasingly need to show investors, regulators, and customers what their waste streams look like and how much they're diverting from landfill. Dimension provides that data infrastructure - not as a side feature, but as a core value proposition.
Lily has been active in the broader ecosystem of women founders and operators in tech. She's a member of South Park Commons, the San Francisco community for technologists and entrepreneurs. 500 Global featured her in their Women Invest/InvestInWomen campaign. She's on the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council. She's building in public, which in waste management means something it doesn't in consumer tech: she's making an unglamorous industry visible enough that smart people will want to work on it.
