The reputation of troubled YC startup Delve has gotten even worse

The reputation of troubled YC startup Delve has gotten even worse

The controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve has gone from unhealthy to worse this week. Among the contemporary allegations from the nameless whistleblower often called DeepDelver is the declare that Delve allegedly took an open source tool and handed it off as its personal work without correct license attribution to or financial settlement with the unique developer.

The story goes that the Delve team pitched a no-code tool it called Pathways to a prospect. That prospect would later turn into the whistleblower DeepDelver. DeepDelver acknowledged that Pathways appeared lots like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and requested Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve of us said they constructed it themselves, the whistleblower contends.

DeepDelver then offered alleged proof that this tool was truly a fork — a modified copy — of SimStudio, modified just sufficient to be handed off as Delve’s personal. If that proves true, it might be a violation of the Apache software license, which requires the unique developer be credited.

DeepDelver calls this “stealing intellectual property,” which is a bit of a stretch, since open source instruments are freely available for use, if they’re correctly credited. But the irony is difficult to overlook: Delve, a startup that purports to promote a compliance answer, could have violated a software license.

Sim.ai’s founder and CEO, Emir Karabeg, confirmed to TechCrunch that he answered DeepDelver’s questions about the allegations. He told the whistleblower that Delve had no license settlement with Sim.ai in anyway.

“We knew they planned to use Sim for something and later tried unsuccessfully to sell them an agreement,” Karabeg told DeepDelver. “I didn’t realize they were going to sell it out of the box as a stand-alone solution.”

Adding to the awkwardness: Sim.ai was truly a Delve buyer, Karabeg told TechCrunch. Both startups had been grads of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, and Y Combinator alumni ceaselessly purchase each other’s merchandise. So while Sim.ai paid Delve, Delve didn’t do the same for Sim.ai.

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Karabeg had even expressed sympathy for Delve after the whistleblower dropped the first bombshell last week. DeepDelver initially alleged that Delve was faking buyer data and utilizing rubber-stamping auditors, allegations that Delve has denied.

Since studying of the Sim.ai allegations, Karabeg has not heard from Delve’s founders. “I was consoling my friends at Delve after the first post was released last week, but since I found out about this news we haven’t been in contact,” he told TechCrunch.

Delve’s alleged strategies preceded its Series A funding round led by Insight Partners, the whistleblower also alleges. We’ve reached out to Insight Partners to ask about this, and about the venerable VC agency’s due-diligence course of.

We know that Insight Partners’ 2025 weblog submit about why it led a $32 million funding into Delve was, for a short while, unavailable on the VC agency’s web site. The agency’s LinkedIn submit about the funding has not been restored, no less than at this time.

Mentions of the Pathways tool on Delve’s website, together with many other pages, also seem to have been scrubbed. Delve didn’t reply to a request for remark, and the media inquiries tackle on its web site not works.

The allegations that Delve could have violated an open source license of a buyer and, apparently, a good friend generated a lot outcry on X that it has turn into a trending subject, full with a scathing community notice.

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