Unofficial record of YC fraud, copycats, and failures: Delve fabricated 493+ audit reports, PearAI forged licenses, Convoy burned $1B+ and sold for $16M.
Key Takeaways
Delve sold AI-generated SOC 2 audits with keyboard-mashed test data to fellow YC companies, was expelled in 2026 after Insight Partners scrubbed its $32M investment post.
Central (YC S24) signed up as a Warp customer, reverse-engineered the payroll playbook, and launched a clone with near-identical marketing copy before being acqui-hired by Mercury.
Naive (YC S25) raised $2M+ marketing “autonomous AI employees” built on Paperclip, a 41K-star MIT-licensed OSS framework, without attribution or license preservation.
Embark Trucks SPACd at $5.2B with zero revenue; Convoy raised $1B+, peaked at $3.8B, and sold assets to Flexport for $16M – a 99.6% wipeout.
The site frames several Tan-era patterns: thin GenAI wrappers (Wuri, CodeParrot), recycled YC slugs (Double Finance to Polished), and circular trust exploitation (Delve targeting YC portfolio companies).
Hacker News Comment Review
Strong consensus that the site conflates ordinary startup failures with genuine scandals, undermining credibility and diluting the real cases like Delve and PearAI.
Commenters noted the Garry Tan targeting is implicit throughout but weakened by padding – misattributed cases like Cruise (a GM issue) and Zenefits (where the spy was from Deel, a separate YC company) muddy the argument.
The site’s UX drew criticism as LLM-designed and pompous, with nested spoiler tags that require multiple taps before showing content.
Notable Comments
@tptacek: “YC has funded over 5000 companies” – 39 failures catalogued here, many ordinary, means the site inadvertently makes a case for YC.
@fillskills: Flags specific misattributions – Zenefits spy was Deel (a YC company), Pebble lost to Apple, Cruise is a GM issue.
@throw03172019: Notes the Deel/Rippling corporate espionage case is absent despite being a more concrete YC-on-YC scandal.
