21-Year-Old MIT Dropouts Raise $32M at $300M Valuation Led by Insight for AI Compliance Startup Delve

San Francisco, CA – In a remarkable display of entrepreneurial prowess, 21-year-old MIT dropouts Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, co-founders of the AI compliance startup Delve, have successfully closed a $32 million Series A funding round, valuing their company at an impressive $300 million. The round was predominantly led by Insight Partners, with additional participation from CISOs at Fortune 500 companies.

This substantial investment comes hot on the heels of Delve’s $3 million seed round announced just in January, underscoring the rapid growth and significant demand for their innovative AI-powered compliance solutions. According to COO Selin Kocalar, inbound interest surged, leading to multiple term sheets before settling on Insight Partners as their strategic long-term partner.

Delve specializes in automating regulatory compliance using advanced AI agents, a critical need for businesses navigating the complex landscape of legal and industry standards. The company has seen its customer base skyrocket from 100 in January to over 500, including rapidly growing AI unicorns like Lovable, Bland, and Wispr Flow.

The journey for Delve began with an entirely different focus. Karun Kaushik (LinkedIn) and Selin Kocalar (LinkedIn) met during their freshman year at MIT, sharing a deep interest in AI and health tech. Kaushik had previously scaled a COVID diagnostic system to thousands of users. In 2023, they embarked on building an AI-powered medical scribe to assist doctors with patient documentation.

However, the stringent requirements of HIPAA compliance when handling sensitive healthcare information revealed a significant bottleneck: the costly and time-consuming manual processes of regulatory adherence. Recognizing this pervasive challenge, they pivoted, dedicating their efforts to developing tools that enable companies to achieve HIPAA compliance faster and more affordably. This strategic shift led them to join Y Combinator last year (Y Combinator Profile) and secure their initial seed funding from General Catalyst, FundersClub, and Soma Capital, among others. Both founders made the bold decision to drop out of MIT during their sophomore year in 2023 to fully commit to Delve.

What started with HIPAA quickly expanded to address a broader spectrum of compliance frameworks. “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 explained, highlighting the universal nature of the problem Delve is solving.

Regulatory compliance, while essential for product launches and closing enterprise deals, often becomes a laborious manual task that hinders growth. “Compliance frameworks are standardized. Businesses aren’t,” stated 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’s innovative solution replaces this busywork with intelligent AI agents that seamlessly integrate with customers’ existing tools. These agents operate in the background, autonomously collecting evidence, generating reports, updating audit logs, and tracking configuration changes across disparate systems. This real-time automation streamlines compliance workflows, significantly reducing manual effort and potential errors.

Looking ahead, Kocalar envisions compliance as merely the entry point into automating broader back-office operations. The AI startup aims to automate billions of hours of work, with plans to expand into adjacent critical areas such as cybersecurity, risk management, and internal governance.

Insight Partners’ investment aligns with this ambitious roadmap. Praveen Akkiraju, managing director at Insight, commented, “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. That’s what makes Delve’s approach so important.”

While the market is seeing an emergence of AI companies focusing on automating business workflows, and major AI labs like OpenAI are developing general-purpose agents, Kocalar views these developments as validation rather than a threat. She emphasizes Delve’s profound domain expertise as a key differentiator.

“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 asserted. “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.”