Privacy Policy

Founder Circle is a community where people building startups list their products, get feedback, find co-founders and help each other. It is operated by Transcybernetics Private Limited, Prasad Farm Nakraunda, near Namkeen Factory, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, which decides how your personal data is used (the "data fiduciary").

You sign in to Founder Circle with a Transcybernetics account, the one sign-in shared by our apps. That account (your email address, password or Google sign-in, and sign-in history) is run by the same company and is described in its own privacy notice. This policy covers everything Founder Circle itself keeps.

What you give us when you join:

• Your name, email address and, if you sign in with Google, your Google profile picture, from your Transcybernetics account. Your full name on Founder Circle starts as that name and is yours to change.
• Your mobile number, gender and date of birth.
• Your profile: a profile photo, headline, a few lines about you, skills, goals, interests, links (LinkedIn, X, Instagram, GitHub, a website) and, if you add them, your location (your state, district and, if you choose one, your locality: a town or city, ward, village, gram panchayat, block or tehsil) and your venture (its name, tagline, website, industry, business type, how it is registered, stage, team size and the year it started). Who sees which of these is set out below.
• That you agreed to our community guidelines, and when.

What you create on Founder Circle:

• Posts, polls and the votes you cast, comments, reactions, reposts and saved posts.
• Products you list (name, description, logo, screenshots, links, a video link), their teams and invitations, upvotes, feedback, tester requests, reviews and ratings.
• Communities you create or join, and what you post in them.
• Messages you send in chats.
• Reports you make, and support requests you send us.
• The contribution points other members' recognition earns you, and who recognised your help.

If you join the waitlist before Founder Circle opens:

• That your account is on the waitlist, your place number, the time our server recorded your joining, and a one-way code made from your email address (so one person cannot take several places with variations of one address). Places are counted in the order our server records each joining, one place per account, and never a second for the same sign-in or the same email inbox, and the first 100 get their membership free; a record that the free membership was given for your place is kept with it.

When you pay:

• What you bought, its price, any code you used, and when you paid.
• The state you are in, which decides the tax on your invoice, and, if you ask for a business invoice, your GSTIN and the business's legal name and address.
• Razorpay's references for the order, the payment and any refund. Your card, UPI, bank or wallet details go to Razorpay, not to us: we never see or store them.
• Which members you have started a conversation with, and how many people you did not already know you started one with each month, for the message allowance on Premium and Business.

What our systems record:

• Technical details of each request: the address requested (which can include something you searched for), your IP address with only its first part kept, your browser and device type, and the time. We do not record what you write in posts or forms in these logs.
• Your full IP address, which we pass to our sign-in service for security when you sign in or your session is renewed, and record ourselves only when a request is refused for being too frequent.
• When you were last active, so staff can see when an account was last used and how many members are active.

Your location, only if you give it. The place you choose is kept with your profile; other members see only its city and state. When you tap "Use my location", and, once you have allowed Founder Circle to use your location in your browser, at most once a day on each device you use, while you have it open, your device's position is sent to us, as precisely as your device gives it. We keep the last 365 positions, and the last 365 areas, those your positions fell in and the places you saved, none older than 365 days. They are never shown to other members, and we do not write them in our server logs. A position only suggests a place: your location changes only when you save it. In Me, under Settings, Location, you can turn the daily position off: we then keep no position at all, and "Use my location" still finds your area when you tap it. There you can also clear every position and area we keep, at once; the place you chose stays until you remove it.

Images you upload are converted, which removes the hidden details photos carry, such as where and when they were taken and the camera used. Only the converted copy is kept and shown; the original is deleted once it is converted.

• To run your account and Founder Circle: your profile, feeds, products, communities, chats, notifications and the leaderboard.
• To show you and others the right things: people and products in Discover, posts from the communities you joined, your contribution points.
• To check you are 18 or older when you join.
• To apply your membership and plan: whether you can take part, how many of your products stay live, and how many new people you can message.
• To take payments, issue tax invoices and credit notes, give refunds, and keep the accounts and tax records the law requires.
• To answer your support requests and handle reports.
• To keep Founder Circle safe: to stop spam, abuse and fraud, to enforce our Terms and community guidelines, and to meet our legal duties.
• To understand what to fix and improve, from the records above. We use no analytics or advertising tools.

We use the information you give us because you chose to give it to use Founder Circle (your consent), and, for safety and legal records, because the law allows or requires us to. We do not sell your personal data, show you advertising, or build advertising profiles.

• Only you, unless you choose to show them: your mobile number, gender and date of birth. Each is hidden until you switch it on in Me, under Personal details. What you switch on appears on your profile page, only to people with a Founder Circle membership, and your birthday appears without the year. We never show them on cards or posts.
• Only you: your venture's business type and how it is registered, if you tell us, and your interests. You see and change them in Me (the first two under Business, your interests under Profile); no other member sees them, on your profile, in Discover or anywhere else.
• Your email address: you, and our support staff and administrators, who can look a member up by it. Others see it only if you choose to show it on your profile page, and then only people with a Founder Circle membership.
• Other signed-in members: your profile page (name, username, photo, headline, the lines about you, city, state and country, venture (except its business type and how it is registered), skills, goals, links, contribution score, how many people you helped, the month you joined, your listed products, and the posts they are allowed to read), your profile card in Discover (name, username, photo, headline, city, state and country, venture (except its business type and how it is registered), skills, goals, contribution score and how many people you helped), and your name, username, photo and headline beside what you post.
• Posts and polls you share with everyone are public: anyone, even without an account, can read them, with your name, username, photo and headline beside them, and can list everything you have shared this way.
• Community posts follow the community: anyone signed in can read a public community; only its members can read a private or hidden one.
• Product pages can be opened by any signed-in member with the link, and listed products also appear in Discover. Reviews and feedback are visible to other members; Helpful votes on reviews are anonymous.
• Chats are seen by the people in them, who also see when you are typing. Deleting a message just for yourself does not remove it for the other person.
• Images you upload are stored at addresses that are hard to guess. Anyone who has an image's address can open it, even without an account, including images posted in private communities. Do not upload anything you would not want shared.
• Until you are a member, your profile is not listed in Discover or on the leaderboard.
• Your membership, plan, payments and invoices: you, and our support staff, managers and administrators. Other members never see them, and moderators do not.
• Who can start a new conversation with you: people you know (your product teams, the private and hidden communities you both joined while it was private or hidden, and anyone you already talk to) always can. Members on Premium or Business can too, from their monthly allowance, unless you choose people you know only, in Me, then Settings, then Who can message you. Founder Circle staff can always start one with you, whatever you choose.
• Founder Circle staff (support, moderation and administration) can see what you post, including in private and hidden communities, to keep the community safe, and support staff read the requests you send them. Staff tools do not show your mobile number, gender or date of birth.

We share personal data only with:

• Amazon Web Services, which hosts Founder Circle and stores its data and images on servers in Mumbai, India, under contract.
• Google, if you sign in with Google, and when your browser loads Google profile pictures, YouTube video thumbnails, or a YouTube video you choose to play (played from YouTube's privacy-enhanced service).
• Our sign-in, chat and messaging services, which are run by the same company.
• Razorpay Software Private Limited, which takes payments and makes refunds for us. Its payment form receives your name, email address and mobile number to fill in, what you are paying for and the amount, and what you enter there, and Razorpay handles them under its own privacy policy.
• Our email provider, which sends the sign-in codes and the verification and password-reset emails for your Transcybernetics account, and Founder Circle's payment receipts and refund confirmations.
• Authorities, courts or advisers, where the law requires it or to protect the rights and safety of our members, the public or ourselves.

Founder Circle's data is stored in India. Images are delivered through Amazon's content delivery network, which can keep temporary copies in other countries so that they load quickly. Google, Razorpay and our email provider can process what they receive outside India.

We use only what Founder Circle needs to work. There are no advertising or analytics cookies.

• Two sign-in cookies that keep you signed in. Your browser cannot read them; one lasts up to 1 day, the other until you sign out or for up to 400 days.
• A short cookie (10 minutes) that remembers the page you were opening while you sign in.
• Your theme (light, dark or matching your device), stored in your browser.
• If you use your location: when your position was last sent and how precise it was, stored in your browser so it is sent at most once a day from that device. Signing out deletes them.
• Unsent drafts of posts and messages, and the screens you visited (for the back button), kept in your browser tab and gone when you close it. Drafts are also cleared when you sign out.
• An offline copy of recently opened pages (kept up to 1 day), of pictures from other sites such as video thumbnails (up to 30 days after you last saw them), and of the app itself, so Founder Circle opens quickly and works when your connection drops. Signing out deletes all of them except the app itself.
• On the Transcybernetics sign-in page, where Founder Circle sends you to sign in, choosing Google can set Google's own cookies. That page is not part of Founder Circle; its own privacy notice covers it.
• When you pay, Razorpay's payment form, which opens inside Founder Circle, can set its own cookies.

We keep your information while your account exists. Some of it goes sooner:

• Notifications: 90 days after their latest activity.
• Your sign-up answers, the photo you saved there included: 90 days after you last changed them if you do not finish (the positions your device sent while you signed up are deleted with them), or at once if you delete your account. Once you finish they are your profile, kept as long as your account is, and the copy made while you signed up is deleted 90 days after you finish.
• Images you upload but never post or save: 24 hours.
• Images you or we delete: their link stops working within minutes, and the image is kept privately, where no one can open it, for 180 days, then deleted. A copy already saved in the browser of someone who viewed it cannot be recalled.
• Your device's positions, and the areas they fell in or that you saved: the last 365 of each, none older than 365 days; the oldest goes as a new one arrives, and any older than that goes too. You can clear them all at once in Me, under Settings, Location. If you delete your account, they are deleted at once, not kept with what a deleted account leaves behind.
• Chat messages you delete "for everyone": permanently removed after 90 days. When you edit a message, the text it had before your last edit is kept with it.
• What a deleted account leaves behind (see Deleting your account): 180 days after you delete your account, then deleted, and gone from our backups within about 40 days after that.
• Anything you or we delete (posts, polls, comments, reviews, reactions, votes, saved posts, upvotes, tester sign-ups, team and community memberships, saved replies): hidden from everyone at once, kept 180 days, then deleted. Anything we hid, words and images, is deleted the same way once it has been hidden for 180 days.
• Server logs: overwritten as new ones arrive.
• Backups of our database: deleted within about 40 days.
• Payment records, invoices and credit notes: kept for at least the eight years India's tax and company laws require, including after you delete your account. We do not yet delete them automatically after that.
• Razorpay's notices to us about a payment: 90 days. They carry no personal details.
• How many new people you messaged each month: about 13 months.
• Your place on the waitlist: kept while your account exists. If you delete your account, it stays with what the deleted account leaves behind (see Deleting your account), so neither the same sign-in nor the same email address can take a second place, and it is deleted with them 180 days later. A place is never given to anyone else.

You can delete your Founder Circle account at any time from Me, then Settings. When you do, we:

• take your profile off Founder Circle, so no one can find or see it;
• make your profile photo and the images you uploaded unreachable at once (their links stop working within minutes), and delete them 180 days later, except a product's logo and screenshots and a community's icon, which stay with the product or community;
• delete your chat messages at once;
• hide at once, and delete 180 days later, your posts, polls, comments, reviews, votes, Helpful votes, upvotes, contribution points, reactions, saved posts, notifications and community memberships;
• delete at once your device's positions, the areas they fell in, your location history, and the district and locality you chose (your location's city and state go with the rest of your profile, below);
• pass each product you own to another member of its team (co-founders first), or delete it if nobody else is on the team;
• end your membership and any plan time you have left, with no refund (ask for one first if you paid within the last 7 days), and delete your billing details and your messaging setting, and the record of who you have started conversations with.

Everything above that is hidden rather than deleted at once, with the details of your deleted profile (such as your gender, date of birth, the lines about you, links, venture, and your location's city and state), the support requests and reports you made, and your place on the waitlist, if you had one (so that sign-in and email address cannot take another), is kept hidden from members for 180 days after you delete your account, as India's IT Rules require, to handle complaints, disputes and legal requests, and to prevent abuse. Then we delete it, and it is gone from our backups within about 40 days after that. Two kinds of record stay longer: your payment records and invoices, for as long as the law requires (see How long we keep it), and the records of moderation decisions, without your name. What stays after that holds none of your words or your name: the records of moderation decisions, and the helpful marks and tester confirmations that other members' points rest on.

If you worked on our staff, the replies you wrote in other members' support requests stay, as our work records. You can ask us to erase anything sooner (see Your rights); where the law requires us to keep it, we will tell you.

Your Transcybernetics sign-in account is separate. Deleting Founder Circle does not delete it, because our other apps use it; signing in to Founder Circle again starts a new, empty profile, without a membership, and it cannot take a second place on the waitlist. If you are the only admin of a community, make someone else admin first. A suspended account cannot be deleted from the app: write to us instead.

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you can:

• see and correct your information: most of it is on Me, under Profile, where you can edit it;
• ask us for a summary of the personal data we hold about you and how we use it;
• ask us to erase your data: delete your account, and write to us for anything it leaves behind;
• withdraw your consent, by deleting your account or writing to us;
• nominate someone to exercise these rights for you if you cannot;
• complain to our Grievance Officer, and to the Data Protection Board of India.

To make a request, write to hello@transcybernetics.com from the email address of your account. We may keep information the law requires us to keep, and we will tell you if we do.

Everything you send to Founder Circle travels encrypted. Our storage and disks are encrypted, our database accepts only encrypted, authenticated connections, staff access is limited by role, and the moderation and account actions our staff take are recorded. Chats are not end-to-end encrypted: they are stored on our servers. No system is perfectly secure, and if a breach affects your data we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

Founder Circle is for people aged 18 or older. We check your date of birth when you join and do not accept anyone younger. If we learn that a member is under 18, we will close their account.

We may update this policy. The current version is always here, with the date it was last updated, and we will give notice of any significant change before it takes effect, on this page and in Founder Circle.

• Data fiduciary: Transcybernetics Private Limited
• Grievance Officer: Hari Prasad Joshi
• Email: hello@transcybernetics.com
• Address: Prasad Farm Nakraunda, near Namkeen Factory, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India
• In the app: Me, then Settings, then Help and support.

We acknowledge a complaint within 24 hours and resolve it within 15 days. You can also complain to the Data Protection Board of India.