Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar were not planning to raise Series A any time soon. Their AI compliance startup, Delve, which announced a $3 million seed round in January, was growing rapidly, signing customers with a steady clip.
Inbound interest then began to roll, COO Kocalar told TechCrunch.
Delve, which automates regulatory compliance with AI agents, ultimately fielded multiple term sheets and eventually shut down its $32 million series with a $300 million valuation. The round was led by Insight Partners and was joined by the Fortune 500 Companies from CISOS, making up the majority of the round.
Insight “is amazing to work with and they felt they were the right long-term partners for us,” the COO said.
Delve’s new rating represents about 10 times the jump from the previous round. Similarly, its customer base has grown to over 500 from the 100 companies reported in January. Many of them are rapidly growing AI startups like the recently-cast AI Unicorn Lovable, Bland, and Wispr Flow.
And while the two-year-old company, made up of AI researchers from MIT, Stanford and Berkeley, appears to have been struck by gold by using AI to eliminate hundreds of hours of manual processes, the story was very different.
Kaushik and Kocalar met as classmates in their freshman year at MIT. Both had a deep interest in AI and health technology. Kaushik had already expanded its Covid diagnostic system to thousands of users during the pandemic.
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In 2023, they began working on medical scribes who powered AI to help doctors process patients’ documents. However, processing sensitive healthcare information prompted us to quickly encounter a world that costly and time-consuming HIPAA compliance.
Instead of continuing to write medical writing, they began building tools to help other companies become HIPAA compliant, faster and more affordable. That pivot led the team to Y-combinators last year to help grow seeds from popular catalysts, Fundersclub, Soma Capital and more. The founder dropped out during his sophomore year in 2023.
What started with HIPAA quickly expanded. “As our customer base grew, they began to seek support from other frameworks: SOC 2, PCI, GDPR, ISO, essentially the whole alphabet soup of compliance,” Kocalar said.
Compliance documents may be required for anything, from product launches to enterprise transactions closures. But instead of promoting growth, that manual work can be a bottleneck.
“Compliance frameworks are standardized. Companies aren’t,” says CEO Kaushik. “That discrepancy is why traditional software has collapsed and teams return to workflows of duct tape across email, slack and shared drives.”
Delve replaces its busy work with an AI agent running in the background (after integrating with the customer’s tools) like internal team members. These agents collect evidence, write reports, update audit logs, track configuration changes across fragmented systems, and automate compliance workflows in real time.
Kocalar says compliance is nothing more than a wedge to broader back-office operations. In the long term, AI startups want to automate the other billion hours of work. Eventually, it will expand to adjacent regions such as cybersecurity, risk, and internal governance.
The interests of our insight partners reflect this roadmap.
“Compliance touches on every part of the way a business operates, from scaling operations to closing transactions to building trust for customers, so modernizing this whole feature can modernize the entire organization. “That’s what makes Delve’s approach so important.”
Still, startups aren’t without competition. Several AI companies are emerging with agents to automate business workflows. Additionally, large AI labs like OpenAI have released generic agents that can perform complex tasks.
That said, Kocalar says these developments are not threats, but validated, and DELVE’s business is validated. She points to the depth of the company’s domain, in contrast to more general-purpose agents.
“As AI advances and labs deploy more sophisticated agent technology, we position ourselves to improve. But what really sets us apart is the deep domain-specific knowledge we are building on our platform,” she said. “Compliance is constantly changing as new regulations emerge and existing regulations evolve, and businesses interpret them in many ways. That’s where Delve stands out.”
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