Compliance has long been a burden for businesses, forcing millions of professionals worldwide to spend their days taking screenshots, updating spreadsheets, and filing compliance documents: tasks that collectively cost businesses billions of dollars in lost productivity. Across the US and EU, more than 4 million professionals routinely perform repetitive, disconnected tasks, copying and pasting evidence, updating spreadsheets, and chasing approvals, simply to maintain compliance. This “compliance busywork” drains an estimated $40 billion annually and hinders the work of sales, engineering, and security teams.
Delve, a San Francisco-based AI company, is now poised to transform this landscape. The startup has secured a $32 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from CISOs at Fortune 500 companies. This brings Delve’s total funding to $35.3 million, counting its $3.3 million seed round raised earlier in 2024.
In an interview with TFN, Selin Kocalar, Delve’s co-founder and COO, explains, “We’re not just streamlining compliance, we’re helping businesses grow faster. Getting compliant faster unblocks deals, and eliminating the busywork lets teams focus on what actually drives the business forward.“
Behind Delve: A meeting of minds at MIT
Delve’s origins trace back to MIT, where co-founders Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar met during their first week, sharing the same academic advisor. Their mutual interest in AI and healthcare sparked a quick collaboration.
Before co-founding Delve, Selin had achieved remarkable success in science and research. By age 20, she had published eight peer-reviewed papers and led an experiment aboard the International Space Station. Meanwhile, Karun worked in cutting-edge AI labs at MIT and helped scale an AI COVID diagnostic tool globally during the pandemic.
Initially, the pair set out to build an AI medical scribe to automate doctors’ notes. However, while navigating the complex HIPAA compliance process required for medical data, they encountered a frustrating reality: the process was expensive, time-consuming, and overwhelmingly manual.
“While developing our medical scribe, we had to complete HIPAA compliance, which cost tens of thousands of dollars and months of work. The process was painfully manual, confusing, and complicated. Having studied AI at MIT, we naturally began thinking about how to automate the HIPAA process,” Selin recalls.
This insight prompted their pivot to building AI tools for automating HIPAA compliance. As customers requested support for additional regulatory frameworks, the team expanded their vision, creating Delve’s AI agents that now automate compliance across HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, PCI DSS, and many other standards.
Female-founded and fearlessly different
Delve proudly identifies as a female-founded startup, with Selin emphasising how her identity shapes the company’s culture and creativity.
“Being a female founder is central to how I operate at Delve,” she says. “I constantly seek creative approaches to doing things differently, whether in building our AI product or reaching prospects. That’s why we distributed 10,000 doughnuts across San Francisco and shipped custom doormats to hundreds of startups as part of our marketing initiatives. I don’t shy away from standing out. I embrace it.”
Delve’s bold creativity and willingness to challenge conventions have been essential in establishing a distinctive presence in the competitive compliance landscape.
What sets Delve apart: AI at its core
While traditional compliance tools merely digitise manual processes, relying on rigid templates, static checklists, and manual data entry, Delve was developed from the ground up with an AI-native platform.
“Our platform provides companies with AI agents that function as team members, understanding company context, navigating fragmented systems, and handling complex compliance tasks end-to-end. Rather than simply adding AI to legacy workflows, Delve was built by AI researchers from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley to automate work that typically consumes hundreds of hours,” Selin explains to TFN.
Delve provides companies with AI agents that function as extensions of the team, understanding company context, navigating fragmented systems, and handling compliance end-to-end. With support for over 25 frameworks, including SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR, Delve’s platform enables real-time monitoring, predictive gap analysis, and autonomous evidence collection.
Insight Partners’ Managing Director Praveen Akkiraju highlights this approach: “Since compliance touches every aspect of business operations, from scaling operations to closing deals to building customer trust, modernising this function will modernise the entire organisation. That’s what makes Delve’s approach so important; they’re not just transforming compliance, they’re transforming how companies operate at their core.”
Accelerating growth and setting the stage for the future
With its new $32 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with participation from top CISOs, Delve is accelerating its AI capabilities, expanding its team, and launching support for additional compliance frameworks.
Delve COO Selin Kocalar summarises the company’s strategy: “We’re focused on making compliance a growth advantage, not a bottleneck. AI won’t just streamline operations. It will fundamentally change how companies operate. Compliance should drive confidence and speed, not create friction. That’s exactly what Delve delivers.”
In just two years since its founding, Delve has grown its customer base by 500%, helping hundreds of fast-growing businesses secure hundreds of millions in contracts by eliminating compliance obstacles and freeing teams to focus on strategic work.
