Delve: The $300M startup eliminating compliance busywork with AI agents (and donuts)

(5 minutes)

Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• 📈 This startup is automating compliance busywork with AI agents

• 🚀 They already have 500+ customers including Lovable, 11x, and Cluely

• 💰 They’ve just raised a $32M Series A at a $300M valuation led by Insight Partners

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Delve 📈

Delve is an AI compliance startup founded by Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar in 2023, with the mission to automate a billion hours of back-office busywork. 💼

Delve transforms regulatory compliance from a slow, painful bottleneck into an automated, revenue-unlocking engine for hundreds of AI companies. 💸

Instead of filling spreadsheets, collecting screenshots, and updating audit logs by hand, Delve’s AI agents quietly run in the background - patching infrastructure, answering security questionnaires, and catching issues before your auditor does.

How Delve Works ⚙️

At its core, Delve is a fully AI-native compliance platform. Its AI agents integrate with tools like GitHub, AWS, Slack, and custom apps to automate the entire compliance process:

🔍 Evidence Collection – Auto-captures screenshots, logs, and evidence from anywhere — even obscure internal tools.
🔒 Infra + Code Scanning – Patches misconfigs, flags issues in pull requests, and keeps your cloud stack in check.
📝 Security Questionnaire Autofill – Answers enterprise vendor forms so you can close deals faster.
🧑‍🏫 AI Policy Assistant – Ask it anything about compliance policies.
🚨 Real-Time Monitoring – Flags gaps before they become audit blockers.
👩‍💻 Slack-Based Expert Support – Real humans respond in <5 minutes.

Bonus: Delve customizes compliance like TurboTax adapting frameworks based on your team, risk level, and stack. No unnecessary checkboxes.

Meet your new assistant (who happens to be AI).

Meet Skej — your new scheduling assistant. Whether it’s a coffee intro, a client check-in, or a last-minute reschedule, Skej is on it. Just CC Skej on your emails, and it takes care of everything: checking calendars, suggesting times, and sending out invites.

Try now to get 10 meetings free

Backstory 🧬

Selin grew up very active, and constantly did sports activities, such as running marathons and completing a Navy SEAL bootcamp with her co-founder. 🪖

Initially, she was "dead set on becoming a PhD" and a doctor, working in research labs and publishing papers. She even launched an experiment to the International Space Station… 

Karun had a non-traditional educational path, dropping out of high school and later MIT. In high school, he took 25 community college classes to explore and push himself. 🏫

He also conducted research at MIT, including a project diagnosing COVID pneumonia from chest X-rays. 🩻He had already scaled a COVID diagnostic system to thousands of users during the pandemic.

He entered MIT Pre-med, believing that healthcare was the best space to make an impact in. 🧑‍⚕️

​​It turned out that Karun and Selin had the same academic advisor and kept running into each other at AI and healthcare events.

They decided to brainstorm product ideas - with no intention of ever building a startup.

Every night for a month straight, they headed to the 5th floor of the Student Center to whiteboard ideas. 🧠

This was right before ChatGPT came out, and they were dreaming up AI tools that felt impossible at the time. 🤖

This is when Karun and Selin started their first project together - an AI medical scribe to help doctors with note-taking.

While building this, they had their "first encounter with compliance" when they needed to become HIPAA compliant. This process was time-consuming, complex, and costly, taking six weeks and tens of thousands of dollars. 🤷

They applied to Y Combinator with the AI medical scribe idea. They got in but there was a twist… 🤯

YC weren't interested in the medical scribe at all - they actually wanted to hear about how they had automated compliance for themselves.

Realizing the pain point, they decided to pivot to compliance. The opportunity was clear: make compliance not suck. 🥱

They both dropped out of MIT at 20 years old, moved to SF, and went all-in on Delve… 🚀

Stats 📊

Fast Forward to today, Delve has:

• 🏢 500+ customers, up from 100 in January.

• 💰 Raised a $32M Series A at a $300M valuation led by Insight Partners, with angels like CISOs at Fortune 500s.

• 📈 Doubled revenue last quarter alone.

• 🤝 Helped startups close deals with Walmart, Chase, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Hertz.

• 🔓 Unlocked $2.3B in new revenue for customers.

Examples:
– 11x saved 143 hours and unlocked $2.3M in contracts.
– Bland closed $500K+ ARR in one week after using Delve.

💣 Go-to-Market: No Cold Emails, Just Donuts and Doormats

Delve's growth playbook is full of high-leverage, zero-template moves:

🍩 Delivered 10,000 donuts across SF with the tagline:
“The only hole in your security we approve of.”

🛬 Flew a plane over SaaStr with a banner:
“SOC 2 made plane and simple.”

🧼 Mailed $6k worth of custom doormats to startups:
“Your shoes look nice. Do your SOCs 2?” 📈 Generated $500k in pipeline in one day

They skip cold emails. Instead, they embed in SF founder communities, share offices with companies like UniFi and Serol, and win via word-of-mouth and white-glove onboarding.

🧠 Why It Matters

Most compliance platforms are clunky, expensive, and reactive. Delve’s AI-native, ultra-customized approach is proactive - helping startups secure deals, improve security, and save thousands of hours.

As AI continues eating software, regulatory risk is the tax every company will have to pay. Delve is building the AI-powered IRS - minus the bureaucracy.

And with an expanding roadmap across cybersecurity, risk, and internal governance, Delve isn’t just tackling compliance.

They’re reprogramming how companies scale securely.

🧨 Final Thought

Selin and Karun dropped out of MIT to eliminate compliance busywork. 500 customers later, they’re proving that automation > admin - and that donuts might just be a better GTM strategy than your CRM.

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