How Startup Grants India handles personal data.

Who We Are

Startup Grants India is a free founder resource for learning about Indian startup grants, shortlisting schemes, contacting the project team, and using an AI grant assistant.

For privacy questions, access requests, correction requests, or deletion requests, contact us through the Contact page and mention that your request is about privacy or personal data.

Personal Data We Collect

Account data: if you sign in with Google, we receive and store your name, email address, profile image, account roles, internal user ID, and chat usage counters.

Email signup data: if you sign up for grant updates, we store your email address, signup source, and timestamps.

Contact data: if you send a contact form message, we store your name, email address, topic, message, status, timestamps, and, if you are signed in, your internal user ID.

Chat data: if you use the grant assistant, we store your chat threads, thread titles, user messages, assistant replies, knowledge sources used for answers, model/provider metadata, token usage, and timestamps.

Voice data: if you use voice input or live voice chat, audio may be sent to a speech-to-text provider or LiveKit. We store resulting transcripts, room/segment identifiers, provider/model metadata, and timestamps when voice transcripts are saved to chat.

Grant tool data: saved grants are stored in your account when you are signed in. For visitors who are not signed in, saved grants, view mode, and theme preference are stored in browser local storage.

Security and rate-limit data: we process IP address, user ID, or email-derived identifiers to protect the site from abuse. These identifiers are hashed before storage in rate-limit records.

How We Use Personal Data

We use personal data to provide accounts, keep your chat history organized, run usage limits, answer grant questions, save contact messages, send requested email updates, maintain admin operations, improve reliability, and protect the site from spam or abuse.

We do not sell personal data. We do not use your chat content for advertising within this website.

Legal Bases

Consent: email updates, optional contact messages, optional voice features, and optional browser preferences.

Contract or requested service: account sign-in, chat history, saved conversations, grant directory interactions, and responses to messages you send.

Legitimate interests: security, abuse prevention, rate limiting, debugging, service reliability, and basic administration.

Legal obligation: where we are required to preserve or disclose information under applicable law.

Cookies And Local Storage

We use necessary authentication cookies through NextAuth so signed-in sessions work. The configured session can last up to six months.

We use browser local storage for theme preference, grant directory view mode, and grant bookmarks when you are not signed in. You can clear these from your browser at any time.

Embedded YouTube videos and Google sign-in may set or read cookies or similar technologies controlled by those providers. Where a feature is optional, you can choose not to use it.

Third-Party Services

Google is used for account sign-in.

MongoDB is used to store site data, including users, signed-in grant bookmarks, subscribers, contact messages, chat threads, chat messages, grants, courses, videos, knowledge chunks, and rate-limit records.

OpenAI-compatible AI providers are used for chat responses and speech-to-text, depending on the configured environment variables.

LiveKit is used for live voice sessions when voice chat is enabled.

YouTube is used to embed course and homepage videos.

These providers may process data outside your country. Their processing is governed by their own terms and privacy policies as well as our configuration choices.

Retention

Rate-limit records are designed to expire automatically after their rate-limit window.

Account records, email signup records, contact messages, chat threads, chat messages, and saved transcripts are kept until they are no longer needed for the purposes described here or until a valid deletion request is completed.

Chat deletion in the app currently archives the chat thread so it no longer appears in recent chats. A full personal-data deletion request should be sent through the Contact page.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live, including if GDPR applies to you, you may have rights to be informed, access your data, correct inaccurate data, delete data, restrict or object to processing, receive a portable copy, withdraw consent, and complain to a data protection authority.

To make a request, contact us through the Contact page using the email address associated with your account or signup. We may need to verify your identity before acting on the request.

Security

We use access controls for admin routes, same-origin checks on write actions, rate limiting, hashed rate-limit identifiers, security headers, and database indexes to help protect personal data.

No online service can guarantee perfect security, so please avoid sending highly sensitive personal, financial, health, or identity-document details through chat or contact forms unless clearly necessary.

Children

Startup Grants India is intended for founders, operators, ecosystem contributors, and adults researching startup grants. It is not directed to children.

Changes To This Policy

We may update this policy as the website, processors, or legal requirements change. The updated date at the top of the page shows when this policy was last revised.