The 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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Karabeg had even expressed sympathy for Delve after the whistleblower dropped the first bombshell last week. DeepDelver originally alleged that Delve was faking customer data and using rubber-stamping auditors, allegations that Delve has denied.

Since learning of the Sim.ai allegations, Karabeg has not heard from Delve’s founders. “I was consoling my friends at Delve after the first post was released last week, but since I found out about this news we haven’t been in contact,” he told TechCrunch.

Delve’s alleged methods preceded its Series A funding round led by Insight Partners, the whistleblower also alleges. We’ve reached out to Insight Partners to ask about this, and about the venerable VC firm’s due-diligence process.

We know that Insight Partners’ 2025 blog post about why it led a $32 million investment into Delve was, for a short time, unavailable on the VC firm’s website. The firm’s LinkedIn post about the investment has not been restored, at least at this time.

Mentions of the Pathways tool on Delve’s site, along with many other pages, also appear to have been scrubbed. Delve did not respond to a request for comment, and the media inquiries address on its website no longer works.

The allegations that Delve may have violated an open source license of a customer and, apparently, a friend generated so much outcry on X that it has become a trending topic, complete with a scathing community note.

Topics

ai agent builder, Delve, open source license, Startups

Julie Bort

Venture Editor

Julie Bort is the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch.

You can contact or verify outreach from Julie by emailing julie.bort@techcrunch.com or via @Julie188 on X.

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The reputation of troubled YC startup Delve has gotten even worse