Dropped out of MIT at 21, with a valuation of $300 million, vows to automate one billion hours of office work.

Every rapidly growing company can't escape the compliance nightmare, which is cumbersome, time-consuming, and costly. Two MIT dropouts are using AI agents to take on this pain point, not only liberating countless office workers but also making top-tier capital willingly write them checks.

Dropping out of MIT at the age of 21, the AI compliance startup Delve, founded last year, not only secured $32 million in financing within six months but also achieved a valuation of up to $300 million.

Selin Kocalar (Chief Operating Officer) and Karun Kaushik (Chief Executive Officer)

This AI wealth-creation myth of MIT dropouts starting a business aims at automating one billion hours of human office work!

And "compliance" is just the beginning of the story.

Unexpected Series A Financing and Stunning Growth

Initially, founders Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar didn't plan to launch a Series A financing round so soon.

After all, their company Delve only received a $3 million seed investment in January this year and has been developing smoothly ever since, with a steady stream of customers.

But a good project can't be hidden, COO Kocalar said. Investment invitations from various parties came one after another.

So, among the multiple investment intentions they received, they finalized this Series A financing of up to $32 million, and the company's valuation soared to $300 million.

This round of financing was led by the well-known investment firm Insight Partners, and some Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) of Fortune 500 companies also participated.

Kocalar said, "The cooperation experience with Insight has been excellent. We believe they are the right partners to achieve our long-term vision."

Delve's latest valuation has increased by about 10 times compared to the previous round.

Meanwhile, its number of customers has skyrocketed from 100 in January to over 500, many of which are high-growth AI startups like Lovable, Bland, and Wispr Flow, which have recently been promoted to AI unicorns.

This company, which has only been established for two years, has a core team composed of AI researchers from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley.

Although they struck gold by using AI to solve hundreds of hours of manual compliance work for enterprises, the starting point of their entrepreneurial story was quite different.

From Hitting a Wall in the Medical Field to Shifting to the Compliance Track

Kaushik and Kocalar were freshmen at MIT, and both had a strong interest in AI and health technology.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kaushik had successfully promoted a COVID-19 diagnosis system to thousands of users.

In 2023, they began to develop an AI medical scribe to help doctors handle cumbersome patient documentation.

However, in the process of handling sensitive medical information, they quickly hit a wall: the expensive and time-consuming HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance.

Instead of persevering with the medical record project, they changed their approach and started developing tools to help other companies achieve HIPAA compliance more quickly and economically.

It was this "graceful turn" that helped the team successfully get selected into the top startup incubator Y Combinator last year and receive seed-round investments from institutions such as General Catalyst.

Also in 2023, the two founders, who were still sophomores at the time, decided to drop out of MIT and fully commit to entrepreneurship.

Starting from HIPAA compliance, Delve's business has expanded rapidly.

Kocalar introduced, "As our customer base grew, they began to ask us to support other compliance frameworks, such as SOC 2, PCI, GDPR, ISO... basically all those dazzling abbreviations in the compliance field."

How Do AI Agents Solve Compliance Pain Points?

Whether launching a new product or winning large enterprise customers, the preparation of compliance documents is crucial.

However, this manual work often becomes a bottleneck for growth rather than a booster.

"Compliance frameworks are standardized, but the business processes of each enterprise vary widely," said CEO Kaushik.

"This mismatch causes traditional software to malfunction in practical applications, and teams have to resort to inefficient workflows pieced together with various tools such as email, Slack, and shared folders."

Delve has replaced these cumbersome tasks with AI agents.

After integrating with the customer's tools, these AI agents operate in the background in real-time, just like internal team members.

They can cross fragmented systems, automatically collect evidence, write reports, update audit logs, and track configuration changes in real-time, thus automating the compliance workflow.

Kocalar said that compliance is just a foothold for them to enter the broader "back-office automation" market.

In the long run, the goal of this AI startup is to automate one billion hours of human work and eventually expand into areas such as cybersecurity, risk management, and internal governance.

The investors at Insight Partners were precisely attracted by this development blueprint.

"Compliance touches every aspect of enterprise operations, from scaling the business and closing deals to building customer trust. Therefore, modernizing this function will drive the modernization of the entire organization," commented Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners.

This is precisely where Delve's value lies. However, this startup is not without competition.

On the one hand, many emerging AI companies are also developing agents for automating business processes.

On the other hand, large AI labs like OpenAI are releasing general agents capable of performing complex tasks.

Nevertheless, Kocalar believes that these developments are a validation of Delve's business model rather than a threat. She emphasized that compared to general agents, Delve has unparalleled domain depth.

"As AI technology advances and major labs launch more complex agents, our own positioning will also be enhanced. But our real moat is the deep and specialized domain knowledge built into the platform," she said.

New regulations are constantly being introduced, and existing regulations are constantly evolving. Different companies also have different interpretations of regulations.

The compliance field is always changing, and this is precisely where Delve stands out.

References

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/22/21-year-old-mit-dropouts-raise-32m-at-300m-valuation-led-by-insight/

This article is from the WeChat official account "New Intelligence Yuan", author: Ying Zhi. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.