Embattled startup Delve has ‘parted ways’ with Y Combinator

The controversy around Delve appears to have cost the compliance startup its relationship with accelerator Y Combinator.

Delve is no longer listed among YC’s directory of portfolio companies, and the Delve page seems to have been removed from the YC website. In addition, the startup’s COO Selin Kocalar posted on X that “YC and Delve have parted ways.”

“I still remember the day we took our YC interview at MIT,” Kocalar said. “We’re so grateful to the community and every founder friend we’ve made.”

YC isn’t the first investor to distance themselves from Delve. Insight Partners also appears to have deleted posts about its investment in the company, although its primary blog post was later restored.

Meanwhile, Delve continues to push back against anonymous claims that it misled clients by telling them they were compliant with privacy and security regulations while allegedly skipping important requirements and auto-generating reports for “certification mills that rubber stamp reports.”

Those claims were first published in an anonymous Substack post attributed to “DeepDelver,” who described themselves as a former Delve customer who became suspicious after receiving leaked data about the startup’s clients.

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

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Meanwhile, Delve became part of a related controversy when malware was discovered in an open source project developed by Delve customer LiteLLM.

In the company’s latest blog post, Delve’s COO Kocalar and CEO Karun Kaushik declared their intention to set “the record straight on anonymous attacks.” Among other things, they claimed that the company has hired a cybersecurity firm “to help us understand what happened,” and said the “evidence points to a malicious attack rather than a genuine whistleblower.”

“It appears that an attacker purchased Delve under false pretenses, maliciously exfiltrated data, including Delve’s internal company data, and used it to launch a coordinated smear campaign against us,” they said. The blog post also includes a screenshot that they said “shows the attacker exfiltrating our audit tracking spreadsheet via file.io.”

Beyond this accusation, Delve also described DeepDelver’s criticism as “a mix of fabricated claims, cherry-picked screenshots, and data taken out of context.” For example, they said DeepDelver “dismisses our AI while acknowledging it automated 70% of a security questionnaire.”

On the question of using open source tools, Delve said it “built on an Apache 2.0 open-source repository, which explicitly permits commercial use, and significantly rebuilt it for compliance use cases.”

However, the executives also said they’ve been taking steps to ensure customers “feel confident in our platform and compliance outcomes.”

Those steps supposedly include cleaning up the company’s network to remove auditing firms “that don’t meet our standards,” “offering complimentary re-audits and penetration tests to all active customers,” and making it “unambiguously clear” that Delve’s templates for things like board meeting notes “are designed to be starting points only.”

In a post on X, Kaushik made many of the same points but also said, “[W]e grew too fast and fell short of our own standard. To our customers, we deeply apologize for the inconveniences caused.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Y Combinator and DeepDelver for any response to Delve’s comments.

Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.

You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailing [email protected].

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