Last updated 17 October 2026

This policy explains what data Incubateer collects, how we use it, who we share it with, and the rights you have. Incubateer is operated by Mahesh Kadamkode from Kerala, India ("Incubateer", "we", "us"). Questions or requests: hello@incubateer.com.

1. What we collect

• Account details: your name, email, and password (stored only as a secure hash, never in plain text).
• Startup profile: the information you enter, such as startup name, industry, stage, bio, the problem you solve, team size, revenue stage, funding stage, location and state, legal entity, founder category, DPIIT or Udyam status, and website.
• Activity: grants you save or track, saved searches, applications and their status, compliance items, documents you upload, and the screens and features you use, recorded against your account.
• A summary of your website: if you ask the app to analyse your website, we read that public page and keep a short private summary of it to help draft your applications.
• Email activity: whether a weekly digest was opened (through a small image in the email) and which links in it you clicked (through a link that passes through our server first).
• Help chat messages: if you use the help chat on incubateer.com, we store what you type, the replies, and the page you were on, and the first message of each chat is emailed to us. Please do not share anything private there.
• Technical data: IP address, browser and device information, error reports, and a cookie needed to keep you signed in.

2. How we use it

• To match grants and schemes to your startup and score how well you fit.
• To run the service: your account, dashboard, application pipeline, and documents.
• To send you account emails, a weekly grant digest when there is something new for you, deadline reminders for grants you are applying to, and alerts about grants you saved. The digest is sent to verified founders by default, and the link in it stops the weekly digest. Deadline reminders have their own switch in your notification settings. You can stop all email at any time.
• To improve the product and keep it secure.

3. AI processing

To match grants, check eligibility and help draft applications, we send relevant parts of your startup profile (such as your bio and sector) to AI providers through their APIs: Anthropic (Claude) first, then Groq, then Google (Gemini) if the one before is unavailable. Messages you type into the help chat go to the same providers. They process this data to return results to us. We do not authorise them to use your data to train their own models, and we send only what is needed for the feature you are using.

4. Who we share it with

Inside Incubateer, other people see your data only in these cases:

• Incubators. An incubator can invite your startup. Until you accept, the invitation shows it only your startup's name. An incubator searching for startups to invite sees only a startup's name. Once you accept, it can see your startup profile, your applications, your compliance items and your readiness, so it can support you. You can leave at any time. If you leave, grants it pushed to you stay in its list under your startup's name only, without your email. Incubators never see your documents.
• Your public profile. It is off unless you turn it on. When it is on, anyone with the link can see your startup profile and the names and status of your five most recent applications.

We use a small set of trusted service providers to run Incubateer:

• Hosting and database: Render runs the app, Neon hosts the database, and Cloudflare serves incubateer.com. Weekly database backups are stored on GitHub.
• Email delivery: Google (Gmail), for account emails, the digest, reminders and alerts.
• AI providers (as described above) for matching, eligibility checks, drafting and the help chat.
• Error monitoring: Sentry receives error reports from the app and the server.
• Analytics: Google Analytics on the app and on incubateer.com. We do not send it your name or email.

We may also disclose data if required by law.

5. Your rights

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act and applicable law, you can:

• Access the data we hold about you.
• Correct or update it.
• Delete your account and data.
• Withdraw consent for optional processing, such as the weekly digest and other emails.
• Raise a grievance about how your data is handled.

To exercise any of these, email hello@incubateer.com and we will respond within a reasonable time.

6. Data retention

We keep your data while your account is active. You can delete your account yourself from Edit Profile, which deletes it and the data tied to it, or ask us to. Copies in our weekly database backups are kept for up to 90 days before they expire. We may keep anything we must keep for legal or security reasons. Help chat messages are not tied to an account, so to have one removed, email us.

7. Security

Passwords are hashed, sessions use signed tokens, and data is encrypted in transit. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information and will notify you of a breach where the law requires it.

8. International transfers

Some of our providers (for hosting and AI) process data on servers outside India. Where that happens, we rely on those providers' safeguards to protect your data.

9. Cookies

We use a cookie to keep you signed in, browser storage to remember your settings and a session id for our own usage records, and Google Analytics cookies to understand how the app and site are used. On incubateer.com, Google Analytics loads only after you scroll, tap or press a key, or after a few seconds on the page. We do not use cookies for advertising.

10. Children

Incubateer is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

11. Changes

We may update this policy. If we make a material change, we will give reasonable notice and update the date above.

12. Contact and grievances

For any privacy question, request, or grievance, contact Mahesh Kadamkode at hello@incubateer.com.