Indian-origin founder breaks silence on allegations against startup Delve: ‘We grew too quick’

Startup accelerator Y Combinator has parted ways with Delve, the compliance startup currently battling allegations of fraud, innotifyectual property misapply and data security lapses. Founded by 21-year-old MIT dropouts Selin Kocalar and Karun Kaushik, Delve was accapplyd last month of providing fake security certificates to clients, as well as stealing an existing open-source tool and selling it as their own product.

The accusations were first published in an anonymous Substack post by a whistleblower calling themselves “DeepDelver”.

Karun Kaushik on fraud allegations

Karun Kaushik, the Indian-origin co-founder and CEO of Delve, addressed the controversy surrounding the compliance startup in a video and a blog post shared Friday.

In the video statement shared on X on Friday night, Karun Kaushik and chief operating officer Selin Kocalar denied claims that Delve provided “Potemkin audits” to its clients. “Potemkin audits” are audits that are fake, created to give the appearance of compliance without actually verifying anything.

However, the CEO of Delve insisted that the allegations stemmed from a malicious actor and not an actual whistleblower. He declared that a person had purchased a Delve service under false pretences, applyd it to access company data, and started a smear campaign.

“The evidence we have points to a tarreceiveed cyberattack from a malicious actor, not a “whistleblower.” We believe the attacker purchased Delve under false pretenses, exfiltrated internal company data, and applyd it to launch a coordinated smear campaign,” Kaushik declared on X.

The whistleblower, DeepDelver, had described themselves as a former Delve customer and shared several posts accutilizing the startup of passing off an open source tool from Sim.ai as its own.

In its statement, Delve refuted these allegations. “The anonymous posts rely on a mix of fabricated claims, cherry-picked screenshots, and data taken out of context.

“For example, the post dismisses our AI while acknowledging it automated 70% of a security questionnaire, highlights a single manual integration while ignoring 600+ automated tests, and falsely claims we “stole” from another YC company when in reality we built on an Apache 2.0 open-source repository, which explicitly permits commercial apply, and significantly rebuilt it for compliance apply cases. They also mischaracterize our apply of policy templates, which are standard across every compliance platform,” the startup declared.

(Also read: Indian-origin CEO reacts to co-founder flying 36 hours for marathon on weekconclude, returning straight to office on Monday)

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Sanya Jain is an Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times Digital. She has nearly a decade of experience in covering offbeat stories that speak to the everyday experience – from viral videos to human interest copies that spark conversation. Her interests stretch across business, pop culture, social media trconcludes, entertainment and global affairs.
Before joining Hindustan Times, Sanya spent two years with Moneycontrol and five years with NDTV. She holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and a master’s in journalism from the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai.
Sanya has a sharp eye for spotting emerging trconcludes and seeing for newsworthy angles to elevate viral posts into meaningful narratives. She was the first one, for example, to cover Narayana Murthy’s remark on 70-hour work weeks that sparked a national conversation.
She is equally at ease writing about business leaders as about the common man, about issues of national importance and memes that amapply social media. Sanya enjoys speaking with content creators, newsbuildrs and entrepreneurs to transform everyday moments into engaging, slice-of-life stories that resonate with readers.
When she is not working, Sanya can be found curled up with a good book. Born and raised in Lucknow, she has spent the last several years in Delhi. She is deeply interested in animal welfare and now spconcludes a lot of her time running after her destructive orange cat.
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