Delve, a security and privacy compliance startup, has lost its relationship with accelerator Y Combinator amid growing allegations about its business practices and technology claims. The company no longer appears in YC’s public portfolio, and its COO Selin Kocalar confirmed on X that “YC and Delve have parted ways,” while expressing gratitude for the YC community. Insight Partners has also appeared to distance itself at times, having deleted posts about its investment before restoring a main blog entry.
These moves coincided with escalating accusations that Delve misled customers by assuring them they were compliant with regulations while allegedly skipping key requirements and auto-generating reports for “certification mills that rubber stamp reports.” The claims originated in an anonymous Substack by “DeepDelver,” who describes being a former customer and has published purported Slack messages, video captures, and evidence that Delve passed off an open source tool as its own. A security researcher further said he was able to access sensitive internal data from Delve.
Delve’s leadership has tried to reframe the situation as the result of a coordinated malicious attack rather than genuine whistleblowing. In a blog post, Kocalar and CEO Karun Kaushik announced efforts to “set the record straight on anonymous attacks,” asserting that a bad actor bought Delve’s services “under false pretenses,” exfiltrated internal data via file-sharing services like “file.io,” and used it to mount a smear campaign.
They characterize DeepDelver’s materials as “a mix of fabricated claims, cherry-picked screenshots, and data taken out of context,” even as they acknowledge that Delve’s AI automated about 70% of a security questionnaire. The executives defend their use of open source by saying Delve built on an Apache 2.0-licensed repository and significantly rebuilt it for compliance use cases. At the same time, they outline remediation steps: removing substandard auditing firms from the network, offering free re-audits and penetration tests, and clarifying that its document templates are only starting points, while Kaushik publicly admits the startup “grew too fast and fell short” of its own standards.
Reference
Ha, A. (2026, April 4). Embattled startup Delve has “parted ways” with Y Combinator. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/04/embattled-startup-delve-has-parted-ways-with-y-combinator/