The controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve got worse this week. Among the new allegations from an anonymous whistleblower known as DeepDelver is an allegation that Delve took open source tools and passed them off as its own work without proper licensing attribution or financial settlement to the original developers.
The Delve team introduced a no-code tool called Pathways to a lead. That prospect would later become whistleblower DeepDelver. DeepDelver recognized that Pathways was very similar to Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio, and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The whistleblower claims it was created by Delve employees themselves.
DeepDelver then presented alleged evidence that the tool was actually a fork (modified copy) of SimStudio, changed just enough to pass over to Delve’s tool. If true, this would violate the Apache software license, which requires credit to the original developer.
DeepDelver calls this “intellectual property theft,” which is a bit of a stretch. This is because open source tools are free to use if properly acknowledged. But the irony is hard to miss. Delve, a startup that claims to sell compliance solutions, may have violated its software licenses.
Emir Karabeg, founder and CEO of Sim.ai, confirmed to TechCrunch that he had responded to DeepDelver’s questions about the allegations. He told the whistleblower that Delve had no licensing agreement with Sim.ai at all.
“We knew they were planning to use the Sims for something and later tried to sell them a contract, but that failed,” Karabeg told DeepDelver. “I didn’t know they would immediately sell it as a standalone solution.”
To add to the awkwardness, Sim.ai was actually a Delve customer, Karabeg told TechCrunch. Both startups come from Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and Y Combinator alumni often purchase each other’s products. So while Sim.ai was paying Delve, Delve wasn’t doing the same for Sim.ai.
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Karabeg also expressed sympathy for Delve after the whistleblower dropped his first bombshell last week. DeepDelver originally claimed that Delve was falsifying customer data and using rubber-stamp auditors, which Delve denied.
Since learning of the Sim.ai allegations, Karabeg has not heard from the Delve founder. “I’ve been comforting friends at Delve since the first post went live last week, but I haven’t contacted them since I heard about this,” he told TechCrunch.
Delve’s alleged methods preceded a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners, the whistleblower alleged. We reached out to Insight Partners to ask about this and the venerable VC firm’s due diligence process.
We do know that Insight Partners’ 2025 blog post about what prompted a $32 million investment in Delve has not been available on the VC firm’s website for some time. The company’s LinkedIn posts about the investment have not been restored, at least for now.
References to the Pathways tool on the Delve site appear to have been removed, along with many other pages. Delve did not respond to a request for comment, and the media inquiry address on its website is no longer working.
Claims that Delve may have violated a customer’s open source license, and apparently friends, sparked so many complaints against X that it became a hot topic, with heated community notes.
