Karun Kaushik

Karun Kaushik is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Delve, an AI-powered compliance automation company based in San Francisco.^[1][6] He and co-founder Selin Kocalar dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during their sophomore year in 2023 to build the company, which raised a $32 million Series A at a $300 million valuation led by Insight Partners in July 2025.^[1] Kaushik was 21 years old at the time of the raise.^[1]

Before MIT, Kaushik founded DemocratizeHealth during the COVID-19 pandemic, building an AI diagnostic tool for COVID-19 and pneumonia from chest X-rays that reached thousands of users in India.^[1][18] He has described himself as a "double dropout," having left both a competitive high school and MIT before completing either program.^[18] Between high school and college, he took approximately 25 community college classes.^[18]

Delve graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and grew from zero to more than 500 customers in approximately eighteen months.^[1][11] In March 2026, an anonymous whistleblower published allegations that the company had fabricated compliance audit evidence for clients.^[8] Kaushik denied the allegations, and Y Combinator subsequently parted ways with Delve in April 2026.^[3][2] Both Kaushik and Kocalar were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Artificial Intelligence category in January 2026.^[14][16]

Kaushik followed an unconventional educational path. He dropped out of a competitive high school and subsequently completed approximately 25 community college classes before enrolling at MIT.^[18] He entered MIT around 2022 as part of the Class of 2026, studying Artificial Intelligence in Course 6-4.^[1][2]

During his time at MIT, Kaushik worked as a research assistant in the Shoulders Lab in the Department of Chemistry from 2021 to 2023, where he developed massively parallel Rosetta-3 algorithms to predict the protein stability of the influenza spike protein.^[18] He met Kocalar during their freshman year; the two were classmates and roommates who shared interests in AI and health technology.^[1][11] Both withdrew from MIT during their sophomore year in 2023 to pursue Delve full-time.^[1]

DemocratizeHealth (2020–2023)

In March 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kaushik founded DemocratizeHealth, a web application that used AI to diagnose COVID-19 and pneumonia from chest X-rays.^[1][18] The platform reached thousands of users in India and operated through August 2023.^[1] The venture ran concurrently with Kaushik's enrollment at MIT and his research work in the Shoulders Lab.^[18]

The experience of building a health technology product — and encountering the regulatory complexity of handling sensitive medical data — directly informed the founding thesis of Delve.^[1]

Delve Technologies (2023–present)

Kaushik and Kocalar co-founded Delve in November 2023 in an apartment in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco.^[1][11] The company was initially conceived as an AI-powered medical scribe to automate clinical documentation, but the founders pivoted after encountering the cost and complexity of achieving HIPAA compliance for their own product.^[1][18] They redirected the company toward automating the compliance process itself, building AI agents that handle evidence collection, documentation, and audit preparation for frameworks including SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS.^[5][17]

Delve was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.^[1][7] By January 2025, the company had 100 customers and raised a $3 million seed round from General Catalyst, FundersClub, and Soma Capital.^[1] The team at that point consisted of eight employees, drawn from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley.^[11][5] Kaushik later said the company reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue before hiring its first salesperson, generating all early revenue through founder-led sales calls from the apartment.^[18]

In July 2025, Delve closed a $32 million Series A led by Insight Partners at a $300 million post-money valuation — roughly a tenfold increase from the seed round.^[1][4][17] The round included participation from CISOs at Fortune 500 companies.^[17] At the time of the raise, the company reported more than 500 customers, including AI companies Lovable, Bland, and Wispr Flow.^[1][4] Kaushik was 21 years old.^[1] The New York Times featured Kaushik and Kocalar in an August 2025 article about young AI CEOs in San Francisco.^[15]

Fraud allegations and Y Combinator departure (2026)

In March 2026, an anonymous author using the pseudonym "DeepDelver" published allegations on Substack that Delve had fabricated SOC 2 audit evidence for hundreds of clients and had used shell auditors to issue compliance reports.^[8][13] TechCrunch reported on the allegations across multiple articles, and a second set of posts by the same whistleblower included additional documentation.^[9]

Kaushik denied that Delve had fabricated final audit reports, characterizing the anonymous posts as relying on "a mix of fabricated claims, cherry-picked screenshots, and data taken out of context."^[2][12] In a separate public statement, he acknowledged that the company had "grew too fast and fell short of our own standard" and apologized to customers.^[3]

In April 2026, Y Combinator parted ways with Delve and removed the company from its directory.^[3][7] The MIT student newspaper, The Tech, reported on the allegations and Kaushik's response.^[2][10] A class action lawsuit was subsequently filed in the Northern District of California.^[13] As of mid-2026, Delve stated it remained operational.^[12][19]

In January 2026, Kaushik and Kocalar were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Artificial Intelligence category for their work building Delve.^[14][16] Kaushik also completed the Z Fellows program, a selective fellowship for early-stage founders, prior to Delve's breakout growth.^[18]

Kaushik is of Indian origin and is based in San Francisco.^[11][15] He has spoken publicly about his parents' emphasis on completing college, noting that the decision to drop out carried particular weight given his family background.^[11] In a year-end post on social media in late 2024, he noted that alongside scaling Delve he had run his first half marathon, completed a bootcamp with a Navy SEAL, and lost 30 pounds.^[20]