Beleaguered startup Delve has spun off from Y Combinator

The controversy surrounding Delve appears to have cost the compliance firm its relationship with accelerator program Y Combinator.

Delve is no longer listed in YC’s affiliate directory, and the Delve page appears to have been removed from the YC website. In addition, Selin Kocalar, the startup’s chief operating officer, posted on X that “YC and Delv have parted ways.”

“I still remember the day we had the YC interview at MIT,” Kocalar said. “We are so grateful to the community and every founding friend we have made.”

YC is not the first investor to distance itself from Delve. Insight Partners also appears to have deleted posts related to its investments in the company, although its primary blog post was later restored.

Meanwhile, Delve continues to respond to anonymous claims that it misled customers by telling them they were compliant with privacy and security regulations while allegedly skipping important requirements and automatically generating reports for “certification mills that issue rubber stamp reports.”

The allegations were first published in an anonymous Substack post attributed to “DeepDelver,” who described himself as one of Delve’s former customers who became suspicious after receiving leaked data about the startup’s customers.

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 had access to sensitive Delve data.

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

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

“It appears that an attacker purchased Delve under false pretenses, maliciously leaked data, including internal Delve 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 leaking our audit trace spreadsheet via file.io.”

Aside from 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 that DeepDelver “rejects our AI while admitting that it automates 70% of security questionnaires.”

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

However, executives also said they are taking steps to ensure customers “feel confident in our platform and compliance results.”

These steps are supposed to include cleaning up the company’s network to remove audit firms “that do not meet our standards,” “offering free re-audits and penetration tests to all active clients,” and making clear that Delve templates for things like board meeting notes are “designed as starting points only.”

In a post on X, Kaushik made many of the same points but also said: “[W]It grew very quickly and was not up to our standards. To our customers, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused.”

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