The controversy surrounding Delve, a Y Combinator-backed compliance startup accused of fabricating certifications for its customers, seems to have spurred its investor Insight Partners to scrub an article explaining its $32 million investment in the startup.
The accusations were detailed last week in a Substack post by an anonymous whistleblower known as “DeepDelver,” who claims to be a former client. DeepDelver alleged that Delve fabricated compliance data for its customers.
The original text of Insight Partners’ article, written by the firm’s managing directors Teddie Wardi and Praveen Akkiraju, among others, and titled, “Scaling AI-native compliance: How Delve is saving companies time and money on compliance busywork,” remains viewable here via the Wayback Machine, an internet archive that preserves snapshots of web pages.
Insight Partners did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Founded in 2023, Delve says it leverages AI to automate the process of obtaining security and regulatory certifications, including SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR — standards that govern data security, health information privacy, and European data protection, respectively.
In their Substack post, DeepDelver alleged that Delve “fabricated evidence of board meetings, tests, and processes that never happened,” then forced customers to “choose between adopting fake evidence or performing mostly manual work with little real automation or AI.”
The post further alleges that Delve’s platform rubber-stamps its own reports rather than undergoing a second layer of independent auditing.
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Delve responded to the accusations by saying it does not issue compliance reports at all, and that instead it is an “automation platform” that ingests information about compliance and then provides auditors with access to that information.
Delve also said that its customers “can opt to work with an auditor of their choosing or opt to work with one from Delve’s network of independent, accredited third-party audit firms.” Those auditors, the startup said, are “established firms used broadly across the industry, including by other compliance platforms.”
In response to the accusation that it’s providing customers with “fake evidence,” Delve countered that it’s simply offering “templates to help teams document their processes in accordance with compliance requirements, as do other compliance platforms.”
While the company is denying DeepDelver’s allegations, the scrubbing of Insight Partners’ investment thesis article suggests that investors may be distancing themselves from the company.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to focus on Insight Partners removing its post about its investment in Delve. A previous version of this story misstated that Delve had disabled the option to book a demo on its website, and that it claimed to have Microsoft, Chase, Paypal and American Express as customers. The story has been corrected to remove those mentions.
