Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar weren’t planning to raise a Series A so soon. Their AI compliance startup, Delve, which announced a $3 million seed round in January, was growing fast and signing customers at a steady clip.
Then, inbound interest started rolling in, COO Kocalar told TechCrunch.
Delve, which automates regulatory compliance with AI agents, ended up fielding multiple term sheets, eventually closing a $32 million Series A at a $300 million valuation. The round was led by Insight Partners, which took up most of the round, with participation from CISOs at Fortune 500 companies.
Insight has been “amazing to work with, and we felt they were the right long-term partner for us,” said the COO.
Delve’s new valuation represents a roughly 10x jump from its previous round. Similarly, its customer base has grown from the 100 companies it reported back in January to over 500, many of them fast-growing AI startups like recently minted AI unicorn Lovable, Bland and Wispr Flow.
And while the two-year-old company, made up of AI researchers from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, has seemingly struck gold by using AI to eliminate hundreds of hours of manual processes, its story began much differently.
Kaushik and Kocalar met as classmates during their freshman year at MIT. Both had deep interests in AI and health tech. Kaushik had already scaled a COVID diagnostic system to thousands of users during the pandemic.
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In 2023, they began working on an AI-powered medical scribe to help doctors handle patient documentation. However, handling sensitive healthcare information meant they quickly encountered the costly and time-consuming world of HIPAA compliance.
Instead of continuing with the medical scribe, they started building tools to help other companies get HIPAA compliant faster and more affordably. That pivot got the team into Y Combinator last year and helped them raise their seed round from General Catalyst, FundersClub, Soma Capital, and others. The founders dropped out during their sophomore year in 2023.
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