{"id":521413,"date":"2026-04-09T12:42:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T12:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/521413\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T12:42:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T12:42:23","slug":"embattled-startup-delve-has-parted-ways-with-y-combinator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/521413\/","title":{"rendered":"Embattled startup Delve has \u2018parted ways\u2019 with Y Combinator"},"content":{"rendered":"

The controversy around Delve<\/a> appears to have cost the compliance startup its relationship with accelerator Y Combinator.<\/p>\n

Delve is no longer listed among YC\u2019s directory of portfolio companies, and the Delve page<\/a> seems to have been removed from the YC website. In addition, the startup\u2019s COO Selin Kocalar posted on X<\/a> that \u201cYC and Delve have parted ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI still remember the day we took our YC interview at MIT,\u201d Kocalar said. \u201cWe\u2019re so grateful to the community and every founder friend we\u2019ve made.\u201d<\/p>\n

YC isn\u2019t the first investor to distance themselves from Delve. Insight Partners also appears to have deleted posts about its investment in the company<\/a>, although its primary blog post was later restored.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Delve continues to push back against anonymous claims that it misled clients<\/a> by telling them they were compliant with privacy and security regulations while allegedly skipping important requirements and auto-generating reports for \u201ccertification mills that rubber stamp reports.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those claims were first published in an anonymous Substack post<\/a> attributed to \u201cDeepDelver,\u201d who described themselves as a former Delve customer who became suspicious after receiving leaked data about the startup\u2019s clients.<\/p>\n

DeepDelver published subsequent posts sharing what they said were Slack and video posts<\/a> from the company, as well as accusing Delve of passing off an open source tool as its own<\/a>, without giving credit or reaching an agreement with the developer. A security researcher also said he was able to access sensitive Delve data<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Delve became part of a related controversy<\/a> when malware was discovered in an open source project developed by Delve customer LiteLLM.<\/p>\n

In the company\u2019s latest blog post<\/a>, Delve\u2019s COO Kocalar and CEO Karun Kaushik declared their intention to set \u201cthe record straight on anonymous attacks.\u201d Among other things, they claimed that the company has hired a cybersecurity firm \u201cto help us understand what happened,\u201d and said the \u201cevidence points to a malicious attack rather than a genuine whistleblower.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears that an attacker purchased Delve under false pretenses, maliciously exfiltrated data, including Delve\u2019s internal company data, and used it to launch a coordinated smear campaign against us,\u201d they said. The blog post also includes a screenshot that they said \u201cshows the attacker exfiltrating our audit tracking spreadsheet via file.io<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond this accusation, Delve also described DeepDelver\u2019s criticism as \u201ca mix of fabricated claims, cherry-picked screenshots, and data taken out of context.\u201d For example, they said DeepDelver \u201cdismisses our AI while acknowledging it automated 70% of a security questionnaire.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the question of using open source tools, Delve said it \u201cbuilt on an Apache 2.0 open-source repository, which explicitly permits commercial use, and significantly rebuilt it for compliance use cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the executives also said they\u2019ve been taking steps to ensure customers \u201cfeel confident in our platform and compliance outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those steps supposedly include cleaning up the company\u2019s network to remove auditing firms \u201cthat don\u2019t meet our standards,\u201d \u201coffering complimentary re-audits and penetration tests to all active customers,\u201d and making it \u201cunambiguously clear\u201d that Delve\u2019s templates for things like board meeting notes \u201care designed to be starting points only.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a post on X<\/a>, Kaushik made many of the same points but also said, \u201c[W]e grew too fast and fell short of our own standard. To our customers, we deeply apologize for the inconveniences caused.\u201d<\/p>\n

TechCrunch has reached out to Y Combinator and DeepDelver for any response to Delve\u2019s comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The controversy around Delve appears to have cost the compliance startup its relationship with accelerator Y Combinator. Delve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15844,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[84,10462,4203,179684,179685,56,54,55,5184],"class_list":{"0":"post-521413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-delve","10":"tag-entrepreneurship","11":"tag-karun-kaushik","12":"tag-selin-kocalar","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom","16":"tag-y-combinator"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}