GoKawiilThe controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve has gone from bad to worse this week. Among the fresh allegations from the anonymous whistleblower known as DeepDelver is the claim that Delve allegedly took an open source tool and passed it off as its own work without proper license attribution to or monetary agreement with the original developer.
The story goes that the Delve team pitched a no-code tool it called Pathways to a prospect. That prospect would later become the whistleblower DeepDelver. DeepDelver recognized that Pathways looked a lot like Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve folks said they built it themselves, the whistleblower contends.
DeepDelver then presented alleged evidence that this tool was actually a fork — a modified copy — of SimStudio, changed just enough to be passed off as Delve’s own. If that proves true, it would be a violation of the Apache software license, which requires the original developer be credited.
DeepDelver calls this “stealing intellectual property,” which is a bit of a stretch, since open source tools are freely available to be used, if they are properly credited. But the irony is hard to miss: Delve, a startup that purports to sell a compliance solution, may have violated a software license.
Sim.ai’s founder and CEO, Emir Karabeg, confirmed to TechCrunch that he answered DeepDelver’s questions about the allegations. He told the whistleblower that Delve had no license agreement with Sim.ai whatsoever.
“We knew they planned to use Sim for something and later tried unsuccessfully to sell them an agreement,” Karabeg told DeepDelver. “I didn’t realize they were going to sell it out of the box as a stand-alone solution.”
Adding to the awkwardness: Sim.ai was actually a Delve customer, Karabeg told TechCrunch. Both startups were grads of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, and Y Combinator alumni frequently buy each other’s products. So while Sim.ai paid Delve, Delve did not do the same for Sim.ai.
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