Delve, a Y Combinator-backed compliance startup accused of fabricating credentials for its clients, has disabled the “book a demo” feature on its website.
The controversy, detailed last week in a post on Substack by an anonymous whistleblower known as “DeepDelver,” also apparently led Insight Partners to scrub an article explaining its $32 million investment in the startup. DeepDelver, which claims to be a former customer, alleged that Delve, which was valued at $300 million during its Series A funding round last year, fabricated compliance data about its customers.
The original text of the article, written by Insight Partners managing directors Teddie Wardi and Praveen Akkiraju, among others, and titled “Scaling AI-native compliance: How Delve is saves companys time and money on compliance busywork,” remains visible. here through the Wayback Machine, an online archive that keeps snapshots of web pages.
Delve co-founders Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, as well as Insight Partners, did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
On its website, Delve claims it has helped clients including Microsoft, Chase, PayPal, American Express and AI search firm Perplexity shave “hundreds of hours” off of compliance work. However, it remains unclear how many of these companies are still active users of the platform.
Founded in 2023, Delve says it leverages artificial intelligence to automate the process of obtaining security and regulatory certifications, including SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR — standards that govern data security, health information privacy and European data protection, respectively.
In his post on Substack, DeepDelver claimed that Delve “fabricated evidence of board meetings, tests and processes that never happened,” then forced customers to “choose between adopting fake evidence or performing mostly manual tasks with little real automation or AI.”
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The post further argues that Delve’s platform seals its own reports rather than being subjected to a second level of independent review.
Delve responded to the accusations by saying that it does not issue compliance reports at all and is instead an “automation platform” that ingests information about compliance and then gives auditors access to that information.
Delve also said that its customers “can choose to work with an auditor of their choice or choose to work with one of Delve’s network of independent, accredited third-party auditing firms.” These auditors, the startup said, are “established companies that are widely used across the industry, including other compliance platforms.”
Responding to accusations that it provides customers with “fake data,” Delve responded that it simply offers “templates to help teams document their processes against compliance requirements, just like other compliance platforms.”
While the company denies DeepDelver’s claims, the disabling of the “reserve demo” feature and the deletion of Insight Partners’ investment thesis article suggest that the startup is in damage control and that investors may be distancing themselves from the company.
