Delve Accused of Stealing Customer Sim.ai's Open Source Tool as Its Own

Delve, the Y Combinator-backed AI compliance startup already facing allegations of fabricating audit results for hundreds of clients, is now accused of a second category of misconduct: taking the open-source agent-building tool of a fellow YC company, stripping out required attribution, rebranding it under a new name, and selling it to enterprise customers for up to $200,000 a contract.

The tool in question is SimStudio, an open-source agent workflow builder created by Sim.ai, also a YC company. Sim.ai CEO Emir Karabeg confirmed that no white-label or attribution agreement with Delve ever existed. "We knew they planned to use Sim for something and later tried unsuccessfully to sell them an agreement," Karabeg told TechCrunch. SimStudio is published under the Apache 2.0 license, which legally requires any derivative work to carry attribution to the original developer.

Delve CEO Karun Kaushik allegedly referred to SimStudio only as "ui inspo for pathways" in an internal message, sent the same day in April 2025 that he was on a sales call with Karabeg personally promising Sim.ai exceptional onboarding as a new $15,000 compliance client covering SOC 2 Type 1, Type 2, and HIPAA. Internal documents later surfaced showing a Notion page titled "Sim Studio Port Plan" that listed specific code folders to copy, along with Linear project tickets referencing SimStudio under the Pathways project name. Despite those internal references, Delve told prospective clients it had built Pathways from the ground up. The startup outsourced ongoing development of the tool to a dev shop in Bangladesh.

Leaked pitch decks show Delve marketing Pathways to Brex, Anthropic, Gusto, and Notion, with an Anthropic proposal dated January 9, 2025 naming specific Delve staff who would build custom Pathways workflows during a one-to-two week proof of concept. The Brex deck promised to make its GRC team "AI native" at a 50-plus percent partnership discount. One confirmed deal with Notion exceeded $50,000. Contract sizes across Pathways customers reportedly ranged from $20,000 to over $200,000. Delve also did not disclose its use of Sim's code during the due diligence process for its $32 million Series A round, led by Insight Partners at a $300 million valuation.

Since the allegations surfaced, references to Pathways have been removed from Delve's website. An Insight Partners blog post explaining its rationale for leading the Series A was also briefly pulled from the firm's site, and the firm's LinkedIn post about the investment has not been restored.

The accusations come from an anonymous whistleblower operating under the alias DeepDelver, who is publishing a five-part Substack series on Delve's alleged misconduct. The story became a trending topic on X, drawing a community note. Karabeg, who had been in contact with Delve's founders after the first round of fake-compliance allegations broke the prior week, said the relationship collapsed once the SimStudio story emerged. "I was consoling my friends at Delve after the first post was released last week, but since I found out about this news we haven't been in contact," he told TechCrunch.

The irony of a company selling compliance services allegedly violating a software license is not lost on critics. Delve charged Sim.ai $15,000 for certifications that have since been called fraudulent, then commercially exploited Sim.ai's own open-source code without the attribution that license required.