The controversy surrounding compliance startup Delve has gotten worse this week. Among the new allegations from the anonymous developer known as DeepDelver is the claim that Delve allegedly took an open source tool and passed it off as its own without a proper license or financial agreement with the original developer.
The story goes that the Delve team commissioned a no-code tool called Pathways to a prospect. That prospect would later become the publisher, DeepDelver. DeepDelver noticed that Pathways looked very similar to Sim.ai’s open source agent development product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was based on SimStudio. The Delve family said they built it themselves, the fortune teller objected.
DeepDelver then presented alleged evidence that the tool was actually a fork – a modified copy – of SimStudio, modified enough to be passed off as Delve’s. If that turns out to be true, it would be a violation of the Apache software license, which requires the original developer to be credited.
DeepDelver calls this “intellectual property theft” which is a bit far-fetched, as the open source tools are freely available for use, if properly installed. But the irony is hard to miss: Delve, a startup that aims to sell a compliance solution, may have violated its software license.
Sim.ai founder and CEO Emir Karabeg confirmed to TechCrunch that he spoke with DeepDelver about the allegations. He told the caller that Delve did not have a license agreement with Sim.ai.
“We knew they were planning to use Sim to do something and later they tried to sell them a deal,” Karabeg told DeepDelver. “I had no idea they were going to sell it out of the box as a standalone solution.”
Adding to the complexity: Sim.ai was actually a customer of Delve, Karabeg told TechCrunch. Both startups were grads of the Y Combinator startup accelerator, and Y Combinator alumni often buy each other’s products. So while Sim.ai paid Delve, Delve didn’t do the same for Sim.ai.
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Karabeg even expressed sympathy for Delve after the caller dropped the first bombshell last week. DeepDelver initially suspected that Delve was falsifying customer information and using rubber-stamping auditors, allegations that Delve denied.
Since learning about Sim.ai’s allegations, Karabeg has not heard from Delve’s founders. “I was comforting my friends at Delve after the first release last week, but since I found out about this news we haven’t been in touch,” he told TechCrunch.
Delve’s alleged practices predate its Series A funding round led by Insight Partners, the source also says. We reached out to Insight Partners to ask about this, as well as the reputable VC firm’s due diligence process.
We know that Insight Partner 2025’s blog post about why it led a $32 million investment in Delve was, for a while, not available on the VC firm’s website. The company’s LinkedIn post about the investment has not been returned, at least at this time.
Mention of the Pathways tool on Delve’s site, along with many other pages, also appears to have been scrubbed. Delve did not respond to a request for comment, and the address for media inquiries on its website is no longer active.
Allegations that Delve may have violated the open source license of a customer and, apparently, a friend created a huge outcry about X that has become a trending topic, complete with a stinging public note.
