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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