Privacy policy

1Who we are

Lensential LLC ("Lensential", "we", "us") is a research and build firm in Austin, Texas. This policy covers this website, the messages you send us, and the Lensential Scout preview. When we work for a customer, our written agreement with that customer governs the documents it sends us; section 6 summarizes how we handle them.

2What we collect

• When you visit this site. Our host, Vercel, keeps request logs: your device's IP address, your browser, the page you asked for and the time. They exist to run and secure the service. We do not use them to profile visitors or to follow you across sites.
• When you book a call or write to us. The booking form on our contact page is provided by Calendly. It asks for your name, your email address and what the call is about, and Calendly sends us the booking. The Lensential Scout access form opens an email to us in your own mail program. It holds your name, firm, work email address and, if you add it, your first question; nothing reaches us until you send it. If you email us directly, we receive what you write.
• When you use the Lensential Scout preview. Its host keeps the same kind of request logs. A question or a request for a write-up goes to our server and to the AI model provider that answers it. The preview counts your questions against a daily limit (see section 9).

We do not buy information about you from data brokers, and we collect no payment details on this site.

3Lensential Scout

Lensential Scout builds one record per young company from public sources. They are SEC Form D filings, federal grant and contract records, and university and program web pages. They also include accelerator, incubator and fund portfolio pages, technology-licensing portals, company websites, job boards and research records such as OpenAlex, NSF and NIH.

Those records name people in their professional roles: founders and officers, investors, researchers and inventors. In Lensential Scout, the expert search ranks researchers and the spinoff pipeline scores how ready their research is to become a company. Both use the published record of their work and show every part of each score.

• We show what those sources publish about a person's professional role and work, and we link every fact to its source.
• We do not store or show email addresses or phone numbers.
• We infer no personal traits such as gender, age, ethnicity or nationality.
• We use no LinkedIn, Crunchbase or PitchBook data.
• Labels marked heuristic are machine reads and can be wrong.

To correct or remove an entry about you, write to hello@lensential.ai with the page address. We review every request and tell you what we changed.

4How we use information

• To answer you, to send a sample you asked for, and to give you access to the preview.
• To do the work a customer engages us for, under our agreement with that customer.
• To run, secure and improve the site and the preview.
• To meet our legal obligations.

We do not sell personal information, we do not use it for targeted advertising, and we do not use it to make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects.

5Who we share it with

• Service providers that run things for us: our website host, our email provider, the Google business account where documents are stored, our scheduling provider (Calendly), and the AI model providers our agents use. They process information on our behalf.
• Bench members from our network and partner firms who work on your engagement, each named to you before work starts.
• People you ask us to share with, such as your partners or co-investors.
• Authorities, when the law requires it, or to protect our rights or someone's safety.
• A successor, if Lensential is ever merged or sold, which takes on this policy.

6Documents you send for a report

Only the people on your engagement see its documents: the principal who signs the work and the analysts who run it, each named to you before work starts. Our two administrators can open the folder only to investigate an incident, and every such access is recorded. Our agents send document text to the AI model providers in section 5, which process it on our behalf. We keep an engagement folder and delete it within six months after the engagement ends, or sooner if you ask. We keep the deliverables we issued, a digital fingerprint of each and the corrections register for seven years, so we can confirm a copy or send a correction. We never train our own models on a customer's confidential data. We train a model on a customer's data only with that customer's explicit permission. An AI model we build for a customer on its data is used for anyone else only with that customer's written consent. What an engagement teaches us goes into our systems only in anonymized form, as the engagement letter states. For a report, we index the documents for search in that engagement's workspace only, and delete the index with the documents. A company brain or a custom AI model we build for a customer is built on its data, in its environment, for that customer. Please do not send material non-public information through our forms. For a live deal, write to us first.

7How long we keep it

• Messages and bookings: as long as we need them to answer you and to keep a record of our dealings, and we delete them sooner if you ask.
• Data rooms: as in section 6.
• Lensential Scout records: while the preview runs, corrected or removed when you ask.
• Preview questions: as long as we need them to answer you and to run the preview. The guest count starts again every day.
• Request logs: for the retention period our hosts set.

8Your choices and rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• tell you what personal information we hold about you, and give you a copy;
• correct it;
• delete it;
• stop using it for a purpose you object to.

Write to hello@lensential.ai. We may ask you to confirm who you are. We answer within 45 days; if we need longer, we tell you why within those 45 days and answer within 45 more. If we decline a request, we tell you why, and you can ask us to reconsider by replying to that message. Some state laws, including Texas law, give residents these rights; we give them to everyone.

If your information is in documents a customer sent us for a report, we act on that customer's instructions, so we pass your request to the customer.

9Cookies and tracking

This website sets no cookies and uses no analytics, advertising or tracking tools. Its fonts and images load from this site, not from anyone else's servers.

The one exception is the booking calendar on our contact page. It is provided by Calendly, LLC (USA) and loads only after you click "Choose a time"; before that click, nothing goes to Calendly. Once it loads, Calendly may set its own cookies, including cookies it uses for analytics and marketing, and handles what you enter under its own privacy notice.

The Lensential Scout preview sets one cookie, ls_gid: a random guest identifier that counts your questions and write-ups against the daily limit. It lasts one year and holds nothing else.

The preview keeps your settings, such as the color theme and saved filters, in your browser's local storage, which stays on your device. It loads some of its code from public content-delivery networks (cdnjs and jsDelivr) and asks OpenAlex for details of research papers. Those services receive your device's IP address with each request.

We do not track you across other sites. No third party receives information about your visit, apart from our host's request logs (section 2), the calendar you choose to open and the services the preview uses, named above. A Do Not Track signal therefore changes nothing here.

10Security

We limit who can see what you send us to the people who need it. Our security page describes how we protect it, and our security pack sets out the policies in full.

Read the security page

11Children

This site and our services are for professionals: investors, startup programs and finance teams. They are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

12Visitors and customers outside the United States

We are based in the United States. If you write to us from another country, your information comes to us in the United States, and our service providers may process it in other countries.

Customers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. When a customer sends us personal information from one of these places, such as a program's applications, we act on the customer's instructions under a data processing agreement. That agreement includes the European Commission's standard contractual clauses for transfers to the United States, with the UK addendum or the Swiss amendments where they apply. We hold the service providers that process the information for us to the same terms, and we name them to the customer before work starts. A customer that prefers its data not to leave its own systems can have us work inside them, under accounts it issues.

Your rights under European law. If the GDPR or the UK GDPR applies to how we handle your information, you have the rights in section 8 and the right to complain to your data protection authority. We handle the messages you send us because we have a legitimate interest in answering them, and the documents in an engagement because a customer engaged us to handle them.

13Changes to this policy

We post changes on this page and update the date at the top. If a change is material, we say so at the top of this page for 30 days.

14Contact

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