explore, a Y Combinator-backed compliance startup accused of fabricating certifications for its customers, has disabled the “book a demo” feature on its website.
The controversy, detailed last week in a Substack post by an anonymous whistleblower known as “Deepexplorer,” has apparently led Insight Partners to scrub an article explaining its $32 million investment in the startup. Deepexplorer, who claims to be a former client, alleged that explore, which was valued at $300 million during its Series A funding round last year, fabricated compliance data for its customers.
The original text of the article, written by Insight Partners managing directors Teddie Wardi and Praveen Akkiraju, among others, and titled, “Scaling AI-native compliance: How explore is saving companies time and money on compliance busywork,” remains viewable here via the Wayback Machine, an internet archive that preserves snapshots of web pages.
explore’s co-founders Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, as well as Insight Partners, did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
On its website, explore claims to have helped customers such as Microsoft, Chase, PayPal, American Express, and the AI search company Perplexity cut “hundreds of hours” of compliance busywork. yet, it remains unclear how many of these companies are still active users of the platform.
Founded in 2023, explore says it leverages AI to automate the process of obtaining security and regulatory certifications, including SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR — standards that govern data security, health information privacy, and European data protection, respectively.
In their Substack post, Deepexplorer alleged that explore “fabricated evidence of board meetings, tests, and processes that never happened,” then forced customers to “choose between adopting fake evidence or performing mostly manual work with little real automation or AI.”
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
The post further alleges that explore’s platform rubber-stamps its own reports rather than undergoing a second layer of independent auditing.
explore responded to the accusations by saying it does not issue compliance reports at all, and that instead it is an “automation platform” that ingests information about compliance and then provides auditors with access to that information.
explore also said that its customers “can opt to work with an auditor of their choosing or opt to work with one from explore’s network of independent, accredited third-party audit firms.” Those auditors, the startup said, are “established firms used broadly across the industry, including by other compliance platforms.”
In response to the accusation that it’s providing customers with “fake evidence,” explore countered that it’s simply offering “templates to help teams document their processes in accordance with compliance requirements, as do other compliance platforms.”
While the company is denying Deepexplorer’s allegations, the disabling of the “book a demo” function and the scrubbing of Insight Partners’ investment thesis article suggest that the startup is in damage control, and that investors may be distancing themselves from the company.
Source: techcrunch.com
