YC Delve’s trouble-making history has taken a turn for the worse

The The controversy surrounding Delve’s compliance it got worse until this week. Between new objections from an anonymous whistleblower known as DeepDelver and what to say that Delve allegedly took an open source tool and passed it off as its own work without proper permission or a financial agreement with the original developer.

The article says that the Delve team created a code-free tool called Optimizing Strategies. That hope will later become the whistle DeepDelver. DeepDelver noticed that Pathways was very similar to Sim.ai’s open source agent-building product called SimStudio and asked Delve if it was derived from SimStudio. The people of Delve said they built it themselves, the whistleblower disagrees.

DeepDelver then provided evidence that this tool was a fork – a modified copy – of SimStudio, modified to be presented as Delve. If this is confirmed, it will be a violation of the Apache software license, which requires the developer to be named.

DeepDelver calls this “intellectual property theft,” which is a little over the top, since open source tools are available for use, if they’re good. But the surprise is hard to miss: Delve, a startup that wants to sell a tracking system, may be violating a software license.

Sim.ai’s founder and CEO, Emir Karabeg, confirmed to TechCrunch that he answered DeepDelver’s questions about the matter. He whistled that Delve does not have a license agreement with Sim.ai.

“We knew they wanted to use Sim for other things and then they failed to sell the contract,” Karabeg told DeepDelver. “I didn’t know they were going to sell it in a box as a stand-alone option.”

Adding to the complexity: Sim.ai was actually Delve’s client, Karabeg told TechCrunch. Both startups were grads of startup accelerator Y Combinator, 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.

Karabeg had expressed sympathy for Delve after the whistleblower dropped the first bombshell last week. DeepDelver initially alleged that Delve was falsifying customer data and using expert rubber-stamping, which Delve denied.

Since hearing about Sim.ai, Karabeg has not heard from the founders of Delve. “I was consoling my friends at Delve after the first post was released last week, but since I found out about it we haven’t met,” he told TechCrunch.

Delve’s proposed strategy led to its Series A funding round led by Insight Partners, the whistleblower said. We reached out to Insight Partners to ask about this, as well as the VC firm’s motivational approach.

We know that Insight Partners’ 2025 blog is why led a $32 million investment in Delvefor a short period of time, it is not available on the VC company’s website. The company LinkedIn post of money has not been recovered, at least at this time.

Mention of the Pathways tool on the Delve website, along with many other websites, as well to appear to it has been fixed. Delve did not respond to a request for comment, and a press contact address on its website is no longer active.

The fact that Delve might violate the client’s open source license and, apparently, a friend criticized X so that it has become a headline, a complete one. and the dreaded word of the community.