Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy for Startup Ignition

Last Updated: May 6, 2026

Welcome to Startup Ignition. At Startup Ignition and its related companies ("we," "our," or "us"), we are committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy ("Policy") explains how we collect, use, share, and protect the personal information of users of our website at startupignition.com, our application at app.startupignition.com, and any related services — including our AI-powered career and entrepreneurial guidance platform, our Wow Factor testing tools, and our participant recruitment features (the "Service"). This Policy applies to all websites, applications, and services that link to this Policy.

1. Information We Collect

We collect information about you in various forms, including personal data. "Personal data" refers to any information that can be used to identify you, either alone or in combination with other information, as defined by applicable data protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR"), the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act ("CCPA/CPRA"), and other U.S. state privacy laws. We collect the following types of information:

Information You Provide to Us: When you interact with our Site or services, you may provide personal data such as your name, email address, postal address, phone number, and demographic information (e.g., age range or country of residence). If you connect your LinkedIn account to our platform with your consent, we may also collect data from your LinkedIn profile, including your bio, work history, and education history, to provide personalized recommendations.

Information We Collect from Third Parties: With your explicit consent, we may obtain information about you from third-party services, such as LinkedIn, through APIs like the Member Data Portability API. This data may include your LinkedIn profile information, which we use to enhance our AI-driven recommendations for startup ideas and career paths.

Information Automatically Collected: When you visit our Site or use our services, we automatically collect certain information about your device and usage, including your IP address, browser type, operating system, referring website, pages viewed, time spent on pages, access times, and interaction with our Site. We use cookies, web beacons, and similar technologies to collect this information. See Section 9 for details on how to manage your cookie preferences.

Voice and Text Interview Data: When you create an interview link through our Wow Factor tools or your audience engages with one, we collect:

• Audio recordings of voice interviews conducted through our platform
• Text transcripts of those interviews (generated automatically via speech-to-text technology)
• Text-based responses from participants in text interviews
• Metadata about each interview, such as duration, completion status, and timestamp
• Any pre-screening responses collected during the interview flow

Audio recordings are captured only after the participant is presented with a clear notice that the session will be recorded and provides their consent. We use audio recordings solely to generate transcripts and analyses; we do not generate, store, or use voice prints or other biometric identifiers from these recordings, and we do not use them to identify individuals beyond the interview itself. Audio files are retained for the period described in Section 4 and then deleted.

Participant Recruitment Data: When you use our Recruit Participants feature to source third-party research participants, we collect or receive:

• Anonymized participant identifiers and demographic categories (e.g., age range, country of residence, employment status, language)
• Submission status, completion timestamps, and reward amounts
• The transcripts and responses of interviews completed by recruited participants
• Status updates and event notifications from our research panel partner

We do not receive directly-identifying information (such as full legal name or contact details) from our research panel partner about recruited participants.

Sensitive Personal Information: Some of the information described above (for example, audio recordings or detailed professional history) may be treated as "sensitive personal information" under the CCPA/CPRA or as "special category data" under the GDPR. We use this information only for the purposes described in this Policy and only to the extent reasonably necessary to provide and improve the Service. California residents have the right to limit the use and disclosure of their sensitive personal information as described in Section 7.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your personal information for the following purposes:

To Provide and Improve Our Services: We use your data to operate, maintain, and enhance our Site and services, including our AI-powered platform that suggests founder-market-fit startup ideas and career paths based on your LinkedIn profile data (e.g., bio, work history, education history). Lawful basis (where GDPR/UK GDPR applies): performance of a contract and our legitimate interests in operating the Service.

To Personalize Your Experience: We analyze your data to deliver tailored recommendations, such as startup ideas or career opportunities that align with your professional background and interests. Lawful basis: performance of a contract and your consent where required.

To Communicate with You: We may use your information to respond to your inquiries, provide customer support, and send you confirmations, invoices, technical notices, updates, security alerts, and administrative messages. Lawful basis: performance of a contract and our legitimate interest in supporting our users.

To Inform You About Promotions and Events: With your consent, we may send you information about promotions, upcoming events, and news about products and services offered by us or our trusted partners. You can unsubscribe at any time. Lawful basis: your consent.

To Ensure Security and Compliance: We use your data to monitor and prevent fraud, enforce our terms of service, and comply with legal obligations. Lawful basis: legal obligation and our legitimate interest in protecting the Service.

To Enable AI-Powered Features: We process your inputs (such as scripts, transcripts, idea data, persona descriptions, and other content you submit) using artificial intelligence services to deliver features like analysis reports, scoring, summaries, persona generation, and recommendations. We do not use your inputs to train our AI systems. We use these AI features through enterprise or API endpoints whose contractual or default terms prohibit the provider from training their models on your inputs and limit retention to a short operational window for abuse monitoring or service delivery. Our AI processing partners currently include leading providers such as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI. Lawful basis: performance of a contract and our legitimate interest in delivering the Service you requested.

To Enable Participant Recruitment: When you choose to use our Recruit Participants feature, we use the information you provide (such as your study content, demographic targeting, and quantity selection) to interface with our research panel partner on your behalf and to manage the lifecycle of your study (recruitment, completion, refunds, and analysis). Lawful basis: performance of a contract.

Automated Decision-Making: Our AI features generate recommendations, scores, summaries, and analyses. These outputs are decision-support tools and do not produce legal or similarly significant effects about you without human involvement. You can request human review or contest any AI-generated output that materially affects you by contacting us at the address in Section 12.

3. Sharing of Personal Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not "share" your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising as that term is defined under the CCPA/CPRA. We may share your personal data in the following circumstances:

With Your Consent: We will share your data with third parties if you have explicitly consented to such sharing. For example, if you authorize us to access your LinkedIn profile, we will only use that data for the purposes you've approved.

With Service Providers: We may share your data with trusted third-party service providers who perform services on our behalf, such as hosting, data analysis, payment processing, or customer support. These providers are contractually obligated to protect your data and use it only for the purposes we specify.

With Our Research Panel Partner: When you use our Recruit Participants feature, we share the minimum necessary study information (target demographics, anonymized study description, payment terms) with our research panel partner so they can recruit suitable participants on your behalf. The panel partner is a separate, independent company. They are contractually bound to follow applicable data protection laws (including GDPR and UK GDPR where applicable), and they have their own privacy policy governing their participants. We will identify our current research panel partner and provide a copy of their privacy policy on request. We cannot control or guarantee data handling by the panel partner beyond our contractual relationship.

With AI Service Providers: We share your content (interview transcripts, scripts, persona descriptions, and similar inputs) with third-party AI service providers (such as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI) to power AI-driven features of the Service. These providers are contractually bound, or operate under default API terms, that prohibit training on your data, limit retention to a short operational period (typically thirty days or less), and prohibit use of your data for any purpose beyond serving your request and providing the underlying API service.

For Legal and Safety Purposes: We may disclose your data if required by law, to comply with legal processes, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Startup Ignition, our users, or the public.

In Connection with Business Transfers: If Startup Ignition is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your personal data may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any such change in ownership or control of your data.

4. Data Retention

We retain your personal data only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Policy, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law. Our general approach is:

• Content you create or upload (interview recordings, transcripts, project data, analyses, scripts, persona descriptions, and similar): retained for as long as you keep it in your account. You can delete individual items, or your entire account, at any time. Once you delete an item or close your account, the associated content will be removed from our active production systems within a reasonable period.
• Account data (e.g., profile, billing, login records): retained for the duration of your account, and for a reasonable period after account closure to allow for reactivation, final reconciliation, and to meet our legal and tax obligations.
• LinkedIn profile data: retained only for the duration needed to generate and refresh our recommendations, or for as long as you keep your LinkedIn account connected to ours, whichever is longer. It is securely deleted on request or after disconnection.
• Recruit Participants records (study records, submissions, recruited participant transcripts): retained for as long as you keep them in your account, and for a reasonable period after account closure to support audit, refund, and dispute resolution, unless you request earlier deletion.
• Backups: our routine encrypted backups may retain data for a short period after deletion from production systems before being overwritten.
• Legal, security, and tax records: we may retain certain records (e.g., transaction history, abuse reports, audit logs) for longer periods where required by law or where reasonably necessary to protect our legitimate interests.

Important note on third-party retention: Data shared with our research panel partner under the Recruit Participants feature, or with AI service providers in connection with AI features, may be retained by them under their own retention schedules and privacy policies. While we will request deletion on your behalf when you ask, we cannot guarantee deletion from systems we do not control.

5. Security of Your Personal Information

We take reasonable and appropriate measures to protect your personal information from loss, theft, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. These measures include encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, secure storage practices, signed integrations with third-party services, and ongoing security monitoring. However, no method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

6. International Data Transfers

Startup Ignition is based in the United States, and your personal data may be stored and processed in the U.S. or other countries where we or our service providers operate, including the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area (in the case of our research panel partner and certain AI service providers). These countries may have data protection laws that differ from those in your country of residence.

Where personal data is transferred from the EEA, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland to a country that has not received an adequacy decision, we rely on appropriate safeguards required under applicable law, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses ("SCCs"), the UK International Data Transfer Addendum ("IDTA"), or equivalent mechanisms. You can request a copy of the safeguards we use by contacting us at the address in Section 12.

7. Your Rights and Choices

You have certain rights regarding your personal data, depending on your location and applicable laws. Subject to the conditions set out in those laws, these rights may include:

• Access: You can request access to the personal data we hold about you.
• Correction: You can request that we correct or update inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Deletion: You can request that we delete your personal data, subject to certain exceptions (e.g., where we are required to retain data for legal reasons).
• Restriction: You can request that we restrict the processing of your data in certain circumstances.
• Objection: You can object to the processing of your data for specific purposes, such as marketing.
• Data Portability: You can request a copy of your data in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format.
• Withdraw Consent: If we process your data based on your consent (e.g., for LinkedIn profile data), you can withdraw your consent at any time, and we will cease processing that data.
• Opt Out of Sale or Sharing for Targeted Advertising: Although we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, you have the right to direct us not to do so in the future.
• Limit Use of Sensitive Personal Information: California residents may direct us to limit our use of sensitive personal information to the purposes specified by law.
• Non-Discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.
• Appeal: If we deny your request, you may appeal by replying to our response or contacting us at the address in Section 12. We will respond to your appeal within the timeframes required by your state's law.

U.S. State Privacy Laws: Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Virginia (and other U.S. states with comprehensive privacy laws as they take effect) have specific rights under their respective state laws. The categories above describe the rights generally available; the precise scope, exceptions, and timeframes are governed by the applicable state law.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at [email protected]. We will respond to your request within the timeframes required by law (for example, within thirty (30) days under GDPR, or forty-five (45) days under most U.S. state privacy laws, with possible extensions). We may need to verify your identity before fulfilling certain requests.

For data shared with our research panel partner under the Recruit Participants feature, or with AI service providers in connection with AI features, we will forward your deletion request, but we cannot guarantee deletion from systems we do not directly control. The panel partner's own data-handling practices are governed by its privacy policy, which we will provide on request.

8. Third-Party Integrations

Our platform integrates with several trusted third-party services to enhance functionality. You can revoke consent or contact us to disable these integrations at any time through your account settings or by contacting us.

LinkedIn (Member Data Portability API): If you choose to connect your LinkedIn account, we will request your explicit consent to access your LinkedIn profile data via the Member Data Portability API. This data may include your bio, work history, and education history, which we use solely to generate personalized startup and career recommendations. We will not use your LinkedIn data for any other purpose.

Research Panel Partner (for Recruit Participants): If you choose to use our Recruit Participants feature, we will interface with a third-party research panel partner on your behalf. We share the minimum information necessary to run your study; we do not share your unrelated business information, ideas, or other private content with this partner. Use of this feature is optional and clearly indicated within the application. We will identify the current panel partner and provide a copy of their privacy policy on request.

AI Service Providers: We use leading AI service providers (such as Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI) to power AI-driven features. As described above, we use enterprise or API endpoints whose terms prohibit training on your data and limit retention to a short operational period.

Payment Processor: We use Stripe to process all payments. Stripe collects and processes payment information per its own privacy policy, available at https://stripe.com/privacy.

9. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use cookies and similar technologies (such as web beacons, pixels, and local storage) to operate the Site, remember your preferences, analyze usage, and improve our services. Cookies fall into several categories: strictly necessary, functional, performance and analytics, and marketing.

Where required by law (including for visitors in the EEA and the United Kingdom), we will request your consent before setting any non-essential cookies, and you can change or withdraw your preferences at any time using the cookie consent tools available on the Site. You can also manage cookies through your browser settings, although disabling some cookies may affect Site functionality. For more information about the specific cookies we use, please refer to our Cookie Policy or contact us at the address in Section 12.

10. Children's Privacy

Our Site and services are not intended for individuals under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 18. If we learn that we have collected such data, we will take steps to delete it promptly. The same age restriction applies to participants recruited through our Recruit Participants feature; the research panel partner enforces its own age verification on its participant pool.

11. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or legal requirements. If we make material changes, we will notify you by updating the "Last Updated" date at the top of this Policy and, where required by law, by providing additional notice (e.g., via email). We encourage you to review this Policy periodically.

12. Contact Information

We welcome your questions, comments, or concerns about this Privacy Policy. You can reach us at:

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom and have concerns about our data practices, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.