Delve, AI start-up founded by MIT dropouts, accused of fraud
The firm has been quietly dropped by Y Combinator
Samuel Yuan–The Tech
When Karun Kaushik ’26 and Selin Kocalar ’26 dropped out of MIT in 2023 to build Delve, a compliance automation AI start-up, things were looking up.
Their company quickly hit a $300 million valuation and was accepted to Y Combinator, a popular start-up accelerator. The pair were spotlighted in a 2025 New York Times feature. And they were the latest poster children of the Silicon Valley motto: “Move fast and break things.”
But new widely-circulated anonymous reports on Substack allege that Delve was breaking too many things, too fast in a sensitive legal area where things just cannot be broken. The articles, written by a former Delve client under the pseudonym DeepDelver, assert that the firm generated fake enterprise compliance reports, used “US-based auditors” that are shells of dubious foreign certification mills, and stole intellectual property. In short, the reports point to fraud at the core of Delve’s business.
Posts about the reports on X have garnered millions of views and Delve has since been quietly removed from the Y Combinator directory.
Among Delve’s clients are firms that process health data from US citizens, which is protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). If Delve’s compliance reports are fraudulent, firms that use Delve’s services might be misled to believe that they are following federal law. Violations of HIPAA are punishable by jail time of up to 10 years.
“Delve built a machine designed to make clients complicit without their knowledge, to manufacture plausible deniability while producing exactly the opposite,” the report stated. “Delve achieves its claim of being the fastest platform by skipping major framework requirements.”
Kaushik and Kocalar have publicly denied the allegations. In a video statement posted on social media on April 3, the pair denounced the reports as “a targeted cyberattack from a malicious actor, not a whistleblower” and a “coordinated smear campaign.”
“The anonymous posts rely on a mix of fabricated claims, cherry-picked screenshots, and data taken out of context,” Kaushik said. “This framing is plainly designed to undermine confidence in Delve across customers, investors, team members, and auditors.”
In a separate social media post, Kocalar also downplayed Delve’s removal from Y Combinator as just “parting ways.” “I still remember the day we took our YC interview at MIT,” Kocalar added.
In January, the Delve founders hosted coffee chats and a tech talk at MIT to interest students in working at the start-up. Kaushik even offered to wire students “$10,000 if you refer our next hire” in a dormspam email sent to most undergraduates.
The pair of Delve founders were also inducted into the 2026 Forbes 30 under 30 list that month. The list also notoriously includes many modern-day convicted fraudsters, including Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried ’14, and Martin Shrekli.