Delve
AI-powered automation for compliance frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR.
Website: https://delve.co/
Cover Block
PUBLIC
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | examine |
| Tagline | AI-powered automation for compliance frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, United States |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Stage | Series A |
| Business Model | SaaS |
| Industry | Cybersecurity |
| Technology Type | AI / Machine Learning |
| Geography | North America |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founders | Selin Kocalar, Karun Kaushik |
| Funding Label | Series A |
| Total Disclosed | ~$35.3M |
Links
PUBLIC
- Website: https://examine.co/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/getdelve
- Trust Center: https://trust.examine.co/
- Y Combinator profile: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/examine/
Executive Summary
PUBLIC
examine is a San Francisco compliance automation startup that uses AI agents to collect and verify evidence for security frameworks such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and GDPR. It moved from stealth to a $300 million reported valuation in roughly 18 months [TechCrunch, July 2025]. The company was founded in 2023 by MIT students Selin Kocalar and Karun Kaushik, went through Y Combinator's W24 batch, and emerged from stealth in early 2025 with $3.3 million in seed funding announced via Business Insider [examine Press, 2025]. Six months later it closed a $32 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with participation from General Catalyst, FundersClub, and Soma Capital [PR Newswire, July 2025]. The product positions itself against established compliance-automation incumbents Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, and Sprinto by promising that AI agents (rather than human operators or scripted integrations) handle the bulk of evidence collection and control monitoring [Crunchbase]. The founding team is young (both founders were 21 at the time of the Series A) and credentialed through MIT and Forbes 30 Under 30 [TechFundingNews]. The next 12 to 18 months will test whether reported customer growth (the company claims 500-plus customers and recent revenue doubling, neither independently verified) translates into durable enterprise contracts, and whether reputational allegations that surfaced in early 2026 alter the trajectory [examine Blog; TechCrunch, March 2026].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by TechCrunch, PR Newswire, and Crunchbase.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value |
|---|---|
| Stage | Series A |
| Business Model | SaaS |
| Industry / Vertical | Cybersecurity / GRC |
| Technology Type | AI / Machine Learning (agentic) |
| Geography | North America (HQ San Francisco) |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Two co-founders, ex-MIT, YC W24 |
| Funding | ~$35.3M disclosed across Seed and Series A |
Company Overview
PUBLIC
examine was founded in 2023 by Selin Kocalar and Karun Kaushik, who left MIT to build the company and pushed it through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch [LinkedIn, 2026; TechFundingNews]. The thesis was straightforward: compliance work for SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and GDPR remains heavily manual at most growth-stage companies, and the existing automation layer (Vanta, Drata, Secureframe) still leans on human operators to interpret controls and stitch together evidence. examine set out to replace much of that interpretive work with AI agents that read source systems directly and assemble audit-ready packages [examine Website; Crunchbase].
The company launched publicly from stealth in January 2025 with a $3.3 million seed round, first reported by Business Insider [examine Press, 2025]. Roughly six months later, in July 2025, examine announced a $32 million Series A led by Insight Partners at a reported $300 million post-money valuation, a notable mark-up for a company barely two years old [PR Newswire, July 2025; TechCrunch, July 2025]. The Series A blog post stated the company had crossed 500 customers, doubled revenue in the quarter, and reached profitability, although none of those figures have been corroborated by an independent third party [examine Blog].
Legal entity details and exact incorporation filings are not publicly available. Headquarters is San Francisco, with the team distributed and currently hiring for DevOps, full-stack engineering, and account executive roles via Y Combinator's job board [Y Combinator]. The most recent material development surfaced in March 2026, when TechCrunch published allegations from customers and former partners regarding the integrity of examine's compliance evidence and audit reports; the company responded publicly via its blog [TechCrunch, March 2026; examine Blog]. Those allegations and the company's response are addressed in the private half of this report.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, PR Newswire, and examine's own blog and press page.
Product and Technology
MIXED
examine sells a SaaS compliance-automation platform built around AI agents that auto-collect evidence, monitor controls continuously, and customize the control set to a customer's environment [PUBLIC] [examine Website]. The supported frameworks publicly listed include SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR, FedRAMP exploration, and penetration-testing coordination, alongside a workflow for responding to enterprise security questionnaires [PUBLIC] [examine Website]. The product also publishes a free "trust report" that customers can share externally to streamline vendor reviews, a feature competitively analogous to Vanta's Trust Reports and Drata's Trust Center [PUBLIC] [examine Website].
The platform integrates with business tools and infrastructure to continuously monitor compliance posture, per Crunchbase's profile [PUBLIC] [Crunchbase]. The pitch to startups specifically centers on offloading what the company describes as 100-plus hours of evidence gathering and audit prep per cycle, with AI agents acting as a copilot to a small in-house security or operations team [PUBLIC] [examine Website]. examine operates a Trust Center at trust.examine.co outlining its own security posture [PUBLIC] [examine Trust Center].
On the technology stack itself, public detail is thin. The open DevOps and full-stack engineering roles on the Y Combinator job board imply a standard cloud-native SaaS stack, but specifics on model providers, retrieval architecture, or evidence-verification methodology are not disclosed publicly (inferred from job postings) [PUBLIC] [Y Combinator]. The company has stated it intends to publish platform demos to be more transparent about how the agents work, in response to outside questions about evidence quality [MIXED] [examine Blog]. Investors evaluating the technology will want to see those demos and form an independent view on how the agents distinguish between collecting an artifact and verifying that the artifact actually satisfies the control.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Product surface confirmed via examine website and Crunchbase; underlying technical architecture not independently verified.
Market Research and Opportunity
PUBLIC
Compliance automation is one of the few categories in security software where the buyer, the budget, and the regulatory tailwind all point in the same direction. Every B2B SaaS vendor selling into the mid-market or enterprise is asked for SOC 2 and increasingly ISO 27001; every health-tech vendor needs HIPAA; every company touching EU residents needs GDPR posture. The category that Vanta effectively created in 2018 has become a default line item for venture-backed startups, and the AI layer examine is selling is the next logical compression of that workflow.
45 billion valuation in 2024 and a $4 billion-plus valuation subsequently, with revenue widely reported in the nine-figure ARR range; Drata reached unicorn status in 2022. Those data points are not examine's, but they establish that the category supports at least one multi-billion-dollar outcome and likely more than one. Insight Partners, which led examine's Series A, has previously backed Vanta-adjacent infrastructure and clearly sees room for a third or fourth scaled platform [Insight Partners].
Demand drivers cited in coverage of the round include the proliferation of AI vendors that themselves need rapid SOC 2 and HIPAA postures to sell into enterprise, the expansion of framework coverage (FedRAMP, ISO 42001 for AI management systems, EU AI Act adjacencies), and continued enterprise pressure on third-party risk management [TechFundingNews; Insight Partners]. Adjacent and substitute markets include traditional GRC platforms (Archer, ServiceNow GRC, OneTrust), audit firms themselves moving downmarket with software, and in-house compliance hires at larger companies who may resist outsourcing judgment to an AI agent.
| Reference point | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| examine Series A valuation | $300M reported | [TechCrunch, July 2025] |
| examine Series A size | $32M | [PR Newswire, July 2025] |
| examine seed | $3.3M | [Business Insider via examine Press, 2025] |
| examine customer count (company-stated) | 500+ | [examine Blog] |
The category is large enough to support multiple winners, the buyer behavior is established, and the AI-agent angle is a credible compression vector. Whether examine specifically captures durable share depends on execution and on resolution of the reputational questions raised in early 2026.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- examine-specific figures confirmed by TechCrunch and PR Newswire; broader market sizing is analogous reference rather than a cited TAM report.
Competitive Landscape
MIXED
examine enters a category with three well-capitalized incumbents and a fast-growing international challenger, and its differentiation rests on the claim that an agentic architecture does work the incumbents still route through humans.
| Company | Positioning | Stage / Funding | Notable Differentiator | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| examine | AI-agent-first compliance automation for SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR | Series A, ~$35.3M disclosed | Agentic evidence collection and verification; free trust report | [PR Newswire, July 2025] [PUBLIC] |
| Vanta | Category creator; broad compliance and trust management | Late stage, multi-billion valuation widely reported | Largest install base, deep partner channel with auditors | [Crunchbase] [PUBLIC] |
| Drata | Continuous control monitoring; mid-market and enterprise | Late stage, unicorn since 2022 | Strong control library and adaptive automation | [Crunchbase] [PUBLIC] |
| Secureframe | Compliance plus security awareness; SMB to mid-market | Growth stage | Bundled training and policy management | [Crunchbase] [PUBLIC] |
| Sprinto | Compliance automation with strong international and India footprint | Growth stage | Cost-competitive, fast SOC 2 motion for global startups | [Crunchbase] [PUBLIC] |
The competitive map breaks into three layers. Incumbents (Vanta, Drata, Secureframe) own the bulk of the US startup and mid-market install base and have multi-year head starts on auditor relationships, framework coverage, and integrations. Challengers (Sprinto internationally, examine domestically) are betting that the next buyer cohort will prefer a different architecture, in examine's case an AI-agent-first stack that promises less human-in-the-loop work. Adjacent substitutes (traditional GRC platforms, accounting and audit firms moving into software, and in-house compliance teams) compete for budget at the upper end of the market.
examine's defensible edge today rests primarily on speed and architectural choice. If its agents genuinely reduce customer compliance hours by an order of magnitude versus Vanta or Drata, that is a real wedge with growth-stage AI-native buyers who are themselves agent-first and culturally inclined toward the approach. The partnership with Insight Partners also opens a distribution channel into Insight's portfolio, a non-trivial advantage for a Series A company [Insight Partners]. The perishable side of that edge: Vanta and Drata can and almost certainly will ship comparable AI-agent features, and they start with a much larger install base of customers and audit partners across which to amortize that engineering.
examine is most exposed on auditor and customer trust. Compliance is a category where the product is ultimately a signed attestation, and any question about the integrity of evidence or the quality of the auditor a vendor recommends compounds quickly. TechCrunch reporting in March 2026 raised exactly those questions, and Insight Partners reportedly removed an investment post amid the allegations [TechCrunch, March 2026]. The most plausible 18-month scenario: winner if examine publishes the promised platform demos, secures public endorsements from name-brand auditors, and grows enterprise logos beyond the ones currently named; loser if reputational concerns harden into auditor reluctance or customer churn before the product narrative resets. The detailed reputational analysis sits in the private half of this report.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Competitor identities and examine funding confirmed by Crunchbase, PR Newswire, and TechCrunch; relative product claims drawn from public marketing and category coverage.
Opportunity
PUBLIC
If examine executes, the prize is a seat at the same table as Vanta and Drata in a category that has already produced one near-decacorn outcome.
The headline opportunity. The single largest plausible outcome for examine is becoming the default AI-native compliance platform for the next generation of software companies, particularly the AI-native cohort that is itself selling agents and needs SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 42001-style attestations to close enterprise revenue. The cited evidence that this is reachable rather than aspirational: a $300 million Series A valuation led by a tier-one growth investor that has studied the category [TechCrunch, July 2025; Insight Partners], a stated customer base above 500 within roughly a year of public launch [examine Blog], and a Y Combinator alumni network that has historically been a powerful distribution channel for compliance tooling (Vanta itself emerged with strong YC adoption).
Growth scenarios.
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI-native default | examine becomes the standard compliance layer for AI startups needing SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 42001 | A marquee AI lab or foundation-model company adopts examine publicly | Category buyer pattern matches the YC and Insight portfolio overlap [Insight Partners] |
| Enterprise land-and-expand | Multiple Fortune 500 customers expand from one framework to a full GRC footprint | Renewal data at >$100K ACV proves out and examine adds FedRAMP at scale | Company already lists Mercury, Superhuman, and unnamed Fortune 500 logos [examine Blog] |
| Auditor-channel platform | examine becomes the back-end software auditors recommend by default | Formal partnerships with named audit firms and published methodology | Insight Partners has experience scaling audit-channel businesses [Insight Partners] |
What compounding looks like. The flywheel in compliance automation is well understood: every customer adds evidence patterns, integration coverage, and control mappings that improve the next customer's onboarding speed; every audit cycle completed builds auditor familiarity that shortens future cycles; every trust report published acts as outbound marketing to that customer's prospects. examine's agentic architecture, if it works as described, compounds an additional axis: each evidence-collection task an agent completes is training signal for the next, which over time should widen the gap with human-operated competitors [examine Website]. Early evidence the flywheel is starting includes the company's stated revenue doubling in the most recent quarter and reported profitability, both company-sourced and unverified [examine Blog].
The size of the win. The credible comparable is Vanta, which has been reported at valuations ranging from $2.45 billion to above $4 billion across recent secondary and primary transactions in widely covered press. Drata reached unicorn status in 2022. If examine captures even a fraction of the AI-native cohort and grows into the mid-market, a multi-billion dollar outcome is on the same order of magnitude as the comparables (scenario, not a forecast). The countervailing risks (reputational allegations, auditor relationships, defensibility against incumbent AI features) are addressed in detail in the private half of this report and should be read alongside this upside case.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Upside framed against confirmed funding and category comparables; customer and revenue figures supporting the flywheel are company-sourced and not independently verified.
Sources
PUBLIC
[examine] examine | SOC 2 Compliance, HIPAA | Automated Compliance for AI, Startups | https://examine.co/
[examine Press] examine's AI-driven compliance in the news | https://examine.co/press
[examine Blog] We Raised a $32M Series A at a $300M Valuation | https://examine.co/blog/series-a
[examine Blog] examine sets the record straight on anonymous attacks | https://examine.co/blog/examine-sets-the-record-straight-on-anonymous-attacks
[examine Blog] Response to Misleading Claims | https://examine.co/blog/response-to-misleading-claims
[examine Trust Center] examine Trust Center | https://trust.examine.co/
[Crunchbase] examine - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/examine-8733
[Crunchbase] Series A - examine - Crunchbase Funding Round Profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/examine-8733-series-a--05d396bd
[PR Newswire, July 2025] examine Raises $32M Series A to Build AI Agents for Compliance | https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/examine-raises-32m-series-a-to-build-ai-agents-for-compliance-302510121.html
[TechCrunch, July 2025] 21-year-old MIT dropouts raise $32M at $300M valuation led by Insight | https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/22/21-year-old-mit-dropouts-raise-32m-at-300m-valuation-led-by-insight/
[TechCrunch, March 2026] examine accused of misleading customers with 'fake compliance' | https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/examine-accused-of-misleading-customers-with-fake-compliance/
[TechFundingNews] examine, led by female MIT alumni, nets $32M to transform compliance with AI | https://techfundingnews.com/female-mit-founders-examine-raises-32m-ai-compliance/
[Insight Partners] Scaling AI-native compliance: How examine is saving companies time and money on compliance busywork | https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/scaling-ai-native-compliance-how-examine-is-saving-companies-time-and-money-on-compliance-busywork/
[LinkedIn, 2026] Selin Kocalar - Co-Founder & COO - examine (YC W24) | https://www.linkedin.com/in/selin-kocalar-2747641b3/
[LinkedIn] examine company page | https://www.linkedin.com/company/getdelve
[Y Combinator] examine jobs | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/examine/
[Quasa.io] The examine Scandal | https://quasa.io/media/the-examine-scandal-how-two-21-year-old-forbes-30-under-30-founders-built-a-300m-ai-compliance-unicorn-and-are-now-accused-of-selling-fake-reports
Articles about Delve
- examine Wants Every Startup's SOC 2 Audit Done by an AI Agent — The San Francisco compliance company raised $32M from Insight Partners and is now defending its reputation in public.