Delve faces new allegations of IP theft and data fabrication

The controversy surrounding Delve, a troubled YC startup, has gone from bad to worse this week. An anonymous whistleblower known as DeepDelver has brought forward new allegations that the compliance startup allegedly took an open source tool and passed it off as its own work without proper license attribution or a monetary agreement. Specifically, DeepDelver reported that Delve’s Pathways tool is an alleged fork of SimStudio, an open source agent-building product developed by Sim.ai. If true, passing the tool off without attribution would violate the Apache software license, an open source license that requires original developers to be credited. The whistleblower accused Delve of stealing intellectual property. This follows previous allegations from last week by the same whistleblower, who reported that Delve was faking customer data and using rubber-stamping auditors.

Emir Karabeg, the founder and CEO of Sim.ai, asserted that Delve had no license agreement with his company. Karabeg confirmed he had answered the whistleblower’s questions regarding the allegations, noting that Sim.ai knew Delve planned to use Sim for something and later tried unsuccessfully to sell them an agreement. “I didn’t realize they were going to sell it out of the box as a stand-alone solution,” Karabeg said. He added that Sim.ai was actually a customer of Delve, and both companies are graduates of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator. Karabeg noted that he was consoling his friends at Delve after the first post was released last week, but they have not been in contact since he found out about this news.

These developments have cast a shadow over Delve’s early-stage funding round, a $32 million Series A led by venture capital firm Insight Partners in 2025. Following the allegations, Delve has reportedly begun scrubbing its website, removing references to the disputed Pathways tool. Insight Partners’ 2025 blog post about the investment was also briefly unavailable, and its social media posts regarding the round have not been restored. Delve has not responded to requests for comment, and the media inquiries address on its website is no longer functional.

Why it matters

The controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve has escalated following allegations that it misappropriated open source software and previously faked customer data, raising questions about the due diligence of its investors.