The controversy surrounding Delve, a Y Combinator-backed compliance startup accused of forging certificates for customers, appears to have spurred the company’s investor Insight Partners to remove an article describing a $32 million investment in the startup.
The accusations were detailed last week in a post on Substack by an anonymous whistleblower known as “Deep Delver,” who claimed to be a former customer. DeepDelver claimed that Delve fabricated compliance data for its customers.
The original Insight Partners article, written by the company’s Managing Directors Teddie Wardi and Praveen Akkiraju, and titled “Scaling AI-native compliance: How Delve is saving companies time and money on compliance heavy lifting,” remains available via the Wayback Machine, an Internet archive that stores snapshots of web pages.
Insight Partners did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Founded in 2023, Delve says it leverages AI to automate the process of obtaining security and regulatory certifications such as SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR (standards governing data security, health information privacy, and European data protection, respectively).
In a post on Substack, DeepDelver claimed that Delve “fabricated evidence of board meetings, tests, and processes that never happened” and forced customers to “choose between adopting fake evidence or doing mostly manual work with little actual automation or AI.”
The post further claims that Delve’s platform rubber-stamps its own reports without a second layer of independent auditing.
tech crunch event
San Francisco, California
|
October 13-15, 2026
Delve responded to the accusations by saying the company does not issue any compliance reports, but instead is an “automated platform” that captures compliance information and provides auditors with access to that information.
Delve also said that customers can “choose to work with an auditor of their own choice or with an auditor from Delve’s network of independent, certified third-party audit firms.” The company says these auditors are “established companies that are widely used across the industry, including by other compliance platforms.”
In response to accusations that it provides “fake evidence” to customers, Delve countered that it only provides “templates to help teams document processes in accordance with compliance requirements, like other compliance platforms.”
Although the company denies DeepDelver’s claims, a scrubbing of Insight Partners’ investment thesis article suggests investors may be distancing themselves from the company.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to highlight that Insight Partners has removed a post about its investment in Delve. A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Delve had disabled the option to book a demo on its website and claimed to have Microsoft, Chase, Paypal, and American Express as customers. The story has been amended to remove those references.
Source link
