The controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve took a turn for the worse this week. Among the new claims by an anonymous whistleblower known as DeepDelver is that Delve allegedly took open source tools and passed them off as proprietary works without proper license attribution or financial agreements with the original developers.
The story is about the Delve team pitching a no-code tool called Pathways to potential customers. That prospect later becomes whistleblower Deep Delver. DeepDelver noticed that Pathways was very similar to Sim.ai’s open source agent building product called SimStudio, and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The people at Delve say they built it themselves, the whistleblower claims.
DeepDelver then provided evidence that the tool was actually a fork (modified copy) of SimStudio, modified enough to pass off as Delve. If that turns out to be true, it would be a violation of the Apache Software License, which requires crediting the original developer.
DeepDelver calls this “intellectual property theft,” but that’s a bit of an overstatement. Because open source tools are free to use as long as they are properly credited. But the irony is hard to miss. Delve, a startup claiming to sell compliance solutions, may have violated software licenses.
Sim.ai founder and CEO Emil Karabeg confirmed to TechCrunch that he responded to DeepDelver’s questions about the allegations. He told the whistleblower that Delve does not have any licensing agreement with Sim.ai.
“We knew they were planning on using the sims for something, but then they tried unsuccessfully to sell us a deal,” Karabeg told Deep Delver. “I didn’t know they were going to sell it out of the box as a standalone solution.”
To complicate matters further, Sim.ai was actually a customer of Delve, Karabeg told TechCrunch. Both startups are alumni of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, and Y Combinator alumni frequently buy each other’s products. In other words, Sim.ai paid Delve, but Delve did not do the same for Sim.ai.
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Karabeg even expressed sympathy for Delve after the whistleblower made his first bombshell last week. DeepDelver initially claimed that Delve falsified customer data and used rubber-stamped auditors, but Delve denies the claims.
Karabeg has not heard from Delve’s founder since learning of the Sim.ai allegations. “I was consoling my friends at Delve after the first post went live last week, but I haven’t heard from them since learning this news,” he told TechCrunch.
The whistleblower also alleges that Delve’s alleged methods preceded the company’s Series A funding round, which was led by Insight Partners. We reached out to Insight Partners to ask about this and the venerable VC firm’s due diligence process.
We do know that a 2025 blog post about why Insight Partners led a $32 million investment in Delve was briefly unavailable on the VC firm’s website. The company’s LinkedIn posts about the investment have not been restored, at least for now.
References to the Pathways tool on Delve’s site and many other pages also appear to have been removed. Delve did not respond to requests for comment, and the media contact address on its website is currently not working.
Allegations that Delve may have violated the open source licenses of customers and apparently friends have caused such a huge outcry against X that it has become a trending topic with scathing posts in the community.
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