The reputation of struggling YC startup Delve has gotten worse

The controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve has gone from bad to worse this week. Among the new allegations from an anonymous whistleblower known as DeepDelver is an allegation that Delve took an open source tool and passed it off as its own work without attributing a proper license to or monetary agreement with the original developer.

The story goes that the Delve team demonstrated a no-code tool called Pathways to a potential customer. This prospect would later become the whistleblower, DeepDelver. DeepDelver recognized 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 Delve team said they built it themselves, the whistleblower confirms.

DeepDelver then provided alleged evidence that this tool was actually a fork – a modified version – of SimStudio, changed enough to pass it off as Delve’s own. If this proves to be true, it would be a violation of the Apache software license, which would require the original developer to be credited.

DeepDelver calls this “intellectual property theft,” which is a bit of an exaggeration, since open source tools are freely available to use, if properly certified. But it’s hard to miss the irony: Delve, a startup claiming to sell a compliance solution, may have violated the software’s license.

Sim.ai founder and CEO Amir Karabej confirmed to TechCrunch that he spoke with DeepDelver about the allegations. The whistleblower told Delve that it had no licensing agreement with Sim.ai at all.

“We knew they planned to use Sim for something, and then later tried unsuccessfully to sell them an agreement,” Karabej told DeepDelver. “I didn’t realize they would sell it as a standalone solution.”

Adding to the embarrassment is that Sim.ai was actually a Delve customer, Karabeg told TechCrunch. Both startups were alumni of the Y Combinator startup accelerator, and Y Combinator alumni often buy each other’s products. So, while Sim.ai paid Delve, Delve did not do the same for Sim.ai.

Karabej even expressed his sympathy for Delph after the whistleblower dropped the first bombshell last week. DeepDelver originally alleged that Delve was falsifying customer data and using rubber validators, allegations that Delve denied.

Since learning of Sim.ai’s claims, Karabeg has not heard anything from Delve’s founders. “I was comforting my friends at Delve after the first post last week, but since I learned this news we haven’t been in touch,” he told TechCrunch.

Delve’s alleged methods predated a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners, the whistleblower also alleges. We reached out to Insight Partners to inquire about this, and the esteemed venture capital firm’s due diligence process.

We know that the Insight Partner’s 2025 blog post about why she led a $32 million investment in Delve was briefly unavailable on the VC firm’s website. The company’s LinkedIn post about the investment has not been restored, at least for now.

References to the Pathways tool on the Delve website, along with several other pages, also appear to have been deleted. Delve did not respond to a request for comment, and the media inquiries address on its website is no longer operational.

Allegations that Delve had violated the open source license of a customer and, apparently, a friend, generated so much outrage over X that it became a trending topic, complete with a scathing remark from the community.