Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar weren’t planning to lift a Sequence A so quickly. Their AI compliance startup, Delve, which introduced a $3 million seed spherical in January, was rising quick and signing clients at a gentle clip.
Then, inbound curiosity began rolling in, COO Kocalar advised TechCrunch.
Delve, which automates regulatory compliance with AI brokers, ended up fielding a number of time period sheets, ultimately closing a $32 million Sequence A at a $300 million valuation. The spherical was led by Perception Companions, which took up many of the spherical, with participation from CISOs at Fortune 500 firms.
Perception has been “amazing to work with, and we felt they were the right long-term partner for us,” stated the COO.
Delve’s new valuation represents a roughly 10x soar from its earlier spherical. Equally, its buyer base has grown from the 100 firms it reported again in January to over 500, a lot of them fast-growing AI startups like not too long ago minted AI unicorn Lovable, Bland, and Wispr Move.
And whereas the 2-year-old firm, made up of AI researchers from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley, has seemingly struck gold by utilizing AI to eradicate a whole lot of hours of handbook processes, its story started a lot in another way.
Kaushik and Kocalar met as classmates throughout their freshman yr at MIT. Each had deep pursuits in AI and well being tech. Kaushik had already scaled a COVID diagnostic system to hundreds of customers throughout the pandemic.
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In 2023, they started engaged on an AI-powered medical scribe to assist docs deal with affected person documentation. Nevertheless, dealing with delicate healthcare data meant they rapidly encountered the pricey and time-consuming world of HIPAA compliance.
As an alternative of continuous with the medical scribe, they began constructing instruments to assist different firms get HIPAA-compliant sooner and extra affordably. That pivot bought the staff into Y Combinator final yr and helped them increase their seed spherical from Normal Catalyst, FundersClub, Soma Capital, and others. The founders dropped out throughout their sophomore yr in 2023.
What began with HIPAA rapidly expanded. “As our customer base grew, they started asking for support with other frameworks: SOC 2, PCI, GDPR, ISO, basically the whole alphabet soup of compliance,” Kocalar narrated.
Compliance paperwork could be obligatory in the whole lot from launching merchandise to closing enterprise offers. However as a substitute of driving progress, its handbook work can turn out to be a bottleneck.
“Compliance frameworks are standardized. Businesses aren’t,” says CEO Kaushik. “That mismatch is why traditional software breaks down and teams fall back to duct-taped workflows across email, Slack, and shared drives.”
Delve replaces that busywork with AI brokers that run within the background (after integrating with clients’ instruments) like inner staff members. These brokers acquire proof, write experiences, replace audit logs, and observe configuration adjustments throughout fragmented programs, automating compliance workflows in actual time.
Kocalar says compliance is simply the wedge into broader back-office operations. Lengthy-term, the AI startup needs to automate a billion hours of different work — ultimately increasing into adjoining areas like cybersecurity, danger, and inner governance.
Perception Companions’ curiosity displays this roadmap.
“Since compliance touches every part of how a business runs, from scaling operations to closing deals to building customer trust, modernizing this function will modernize the entire organization,” stated Praveen Akkiraju, managing director at Perception. “That’s what makes Delve’s approach so important.”
Nonetheless, the startup received’t be with out competitors. A number of AI firms are rising with brokers to automate enterprise workflows. As well as, bigger AI labs like OpenAI are releasing general-purpose brokers able to performing complicated duties.
That stated, Kocalar says these developments are a validation, not a menace, to Delve’s enterprise. She factors to the corporate’s area depth in distinction to extra general-purpose brokers.
“We’re positioning ourselves to improve as AI advances and labs roll out more sophisticated agentic technologies. But what truly sets us apart is the deep, domain-specific knowledge we’re building into the platform,” she stated. “Compliance is always shifting as new regulations emerge and existing ones evolve, with companies interpreting them in different ways. That’s where Delve stands out.”
