Disclosures

1Not registered as an investment adviser or broker-dealer

Lensential provides research, analytical work product and custom builds. It is not registered as an investment adviser or a broker-dealer and does not recommend for or against any investment. Nothing we publish or deliver is an offer to buy or sell a security, or legal, tax or accounting advice. The investment decision is always yours.

Our recommendations concern decisions a company, studio or program makes about its own business or venture, such as what to build, price, fund, sell or stop. They are made to that business, and they are never advice to anyone to buy or sell a security.

2What our reports are

• Our reports are produced by AI agents that our analysts run, and a principal reads and signs each one before it reaches you. The agents check their own work against written quality bars before anything leaves, and every finding shows how to reproduce it.
• Lensential PE states findings and prices outcomes. The IC paper proposes a price tolerance and the committee sets it. Returns and debt headroom are our arithmetic on labeled inputs, not predictions.
• Lensential Venture and Lensential PE give every claim they check one of six evidence labels; Lensential Consult labels each assumption as fact, estimate or leap of faith. A grade is investor judgment on the evidence, not a prediction of returns. Exit and convertible-note figures are screening arithmetic built on the terms and comparables in the file.
• Not finding a public record does not make a claim false. We say where we looked.
• When a finding changes, we send a correction and keep the earlier reading in a register.
• We do not run background checks of the kind licensed screening firms run: no criminal, credit or litigation searches.

3Our own investments

Our principals invest in startups through angel networks and venture funds, and hold partner roles at venture funds; the About page names them. They may hold positions in a company we are asked to research, in its competitors, or in funds that invest in them. Before we open a file, we tell you about any position or role we know of in the company or its direct competitors.

See who we are

4Work for companies

A company preparing a round can commission a Lensential Venture report on itself. The company is then our customer for that report, and the report says so on its first page.

• The fee is fixed before we start. It does not depend on what we find or on whether the round closes. We take no part in the raise: we do not introduce investors, negotiate terms or take any fee tied to the round.
• The company may correct a fact, answer a finding or withdraw a claim. Every change is recorded in the corrections register with the earlier reading kept. No adverse finding is removed at the company's request.
• An investor who receives the report can ask us to confirm that their copy is the one we issued. We confirm the copy. We keep every report we issue, its digital fingerprint and its corrections register for seven years, so we can do this. We do not run separate diligence on that company for that investor in the same round.
• If a customer has already engaged us on the company, we decline the company's request; if the company engaged us first, we decline an investor's request for separate diligence in that round.

We work for more than one company in the same market, and the work for each stays private. While a company has engaged us for a report on itself, a turnaround study or a concept test, we decline work for its direct competitor. This rule does not cover what we build for a company, or the screens and profiles we prepare for investors and startup programs.

Sometimes we already work on a deal for one party, such as the investor leading it, and another investor asks us to work on the same deal. We tell the second investor before we start, without saying what we found, and we do not take the work if that investor asks us not to.

5Work for startup programs

Accelerators, incubators, venture studios and other startup programs can engage us to screen applicants, check finalists, write the follow-on paper on a company or test a concept before it is built. The program is then our customer, whether a nonprofit, a company, a government or a university runs it, and these rules apply in addition to sections 3 and 4.

Applicants and concepts. What a program sends us about its applicants, its companies or its concepts is never shown to another customer, and our principals do not use it for their own investing.

Our principals' own investments. A principal who reads or signs a paper on a company for a program does not invest in that company for six months after we deliver the paper. This holds whether or not the program accepts the company, and the program can waive it in writing. Before we screen a cycle, we tell the program about any position or role our principals hold in its applicants or in the program itself. A share in a program's pool of graduate companies counts as a position in each of those companies.

Mentoring. Our principals mentor founders in startup programs, and the About page names those programs. A principal who mentors a company's founders does not read or sign a paper on that company.

The same company on both sides. If we later work on a company we screened for a program, we tell the new customer that we have worked on it before. We do not say for whom or what we found, and the new work starts from the documents the new customer gives us.

When a program pays for a company's report. A program can pay for work on one of its companies, such as a raise-readiness report. The company is still our customer for the findings. It sees them first and alone, and decides what the program receives. We do not write the program's follow-on paper on that company in the same funding round.

Competing concepts. We may test concepts in the same market for different customers. We do not test two concepts that would do much the same thing for two customers at the same time, for any mix of programs, venture studios and corporate venture teams. A concept test also falls under the direct-competitor rule in section 4.

No fee from applicants. We take no fee from a company for work on its application to a program we serve.

6Material non-public information

Please do not send us material non-public information through our forms. For a live deal, write to us first. Our policy on material non-public information and personal trading is part of our security pack, which we send on request.

Read the security page

7Specimens and comparisons

Thornlark Diagnostics, Tessaline Packaging Group, Kellmere Instruments, Brindlecote Systems, Rimewater and every company, person and figure named in our specimens are fictional. The compare page draws on each company's own public material, read on the date shown, and Lensential wrote it.

8Customers

We name no customer without that customer's consent, and we publish no customer results.

9Contact

Lensential LLC, Austin, Texas. hello@lensential.ai