Privacy policy

Founder Arena ("we", "us") runs this website and the competition. Contact us about privacy at hello@founderarena.app.

Account details: your email address, username, legal name, and whether your email is verified. Your password is handled by our sign-in provider; we never see or store it.

Your application: your answers, your pitch deck if you upload one, and when you started, submitted or withdrew it.

AI screening results: the scores, score band, flags and the private summary for the judges.

Records of important actions, such as submitting or withdrawing an application and changes made by staff, kept for security and fairness.

Our team's private notes about your application, used to judge the competition. They're never published.

Site visits: the page visited, the website that referred you, campaign tags in the link, your device type (phone, tablet or computer), and your approximate city, region and country. We work out the location from your IP address when you visit and then discard the IP address: we never store it. To count unique visitors we keep a code that changes every day and can't be used to identify you or follow you from day to day. We don't count visits by our own staff.

Messages: what you and our team write to each other in your Founder Arena messages, and anything you send us by email.

Updates: if you ask for Founder Arena updates when creating your account, when you did, the wording you agreed to, and if you later unsubscribe.

Emails we send: to limit how many emails we send, we keep a scrambled (hashed) form of the email address for 7 days.

To run your account, receive and screen applications, run each stage of the competition, contact you about your application and account (in your messages and by email), create competition content, keep the site secure and prevent abuse and cheating, understand how people find and use the site, and meet legal obligations.

We don't sell your personal information, and we don't use it for advertising.

On the site, the leaderboard shows your username, category, score and score band. On stream and in videos, we may show and discuss your application, including your answers, pitch deck and demo, identified only by your username. If you advance, meetings with the judges may be streamed or recorded, and you may appear on camera.

Your legal name, email address and contact details are never shown publicly. Staff can see them to run the competition.

Content published on third-party platforms such as YouTube or Twitch is also subject to those platforms' own policies.

We use AI models to score applications and to write a private summary for the judges. We send your answers and pitch deck to the AI service that runs these models, never your legal name, email address or username, and we ask it not to keep them for later use. The score and summary support the judges; they don't decide on their own who advances or receives funding.

We use trusted service providers to run the site, for example for hosting and data storage, sign-in, screening applications with AI models, sending emails, and our domain and email forwarding. They process information only to provide their services to us.

Our main data is stored in Canada. Some providers process information in the United States or other countries, where local laws may allow authorities to access it.

We use two cookies: one that keeps you signed in (expires after 5 days) and one that remembers whether you chose light or dark mode. Our sign-in provider also keeps sign-in information in your browser's storage. We don't use advertising or tracking cookies, and our visit counting doesn't use cookies.

We keep your account and application information while your account is open and for as long as we need it to run each season and keep its records, including past seasons' results. We keep information longer where the law requires it or where it relates to a funding agreement.

If you ask us to delete your account, we delete your personal information and remove your username from our leaderboards, except what we must keep for legal reasons or records of funding. Content already streamed or published on other platforms may remain there.

You can ask to see the personal information we hold about you, correct it, or delete it, or ask a question about how we use it, by emailing hello@founderarena.app. We'll reply within 30 days. Depending on where you live, you may have other rights under privacy laws, and you may complain to your privacy regulator, such as the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

You can withdraw your application at any time from your dashboard. We only send updates about Founder Arena (new seasons, episodes and results) to people who ask for them when creating their account. Every update has an unsubscribe link. If you unsubscribe, we keep a record of that so we don't email you again.

We protect your information with access controls, encryption in transit, private file storage, and by limiting who on our team can see private details. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects you, we'll tell you as required by law.

The site is for adults. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

We'll show the date of the latest version here and tell you about important changes on the site or by email.