Privacy Policy

Privacy Notice — Start-Up Series

Last updated: 12 July 2026

1. Who we are

The Start-Up Series is a program for founders building at the UAE-India corridor. Our purpose is to make it easier for ambitious founders to grow across both markets — through customers, capital, partners, talent, and the right introductions at the right time.

The program is operated under the auspices of the UAE-India CEPA Council, with the support of operating partners in the UAE and India.

When you apply, the information you share is held by The Start Up Series, which makes us, in the language of data-protection law, the controller of that information. That means we are responsible for keeping it safe, using it only for the purposes you have agreed to, and answering any questions or requests you have about it.

Privacy enquiries are always welcome at privacy@startupseries.com. For applicants in India, our designated grievance officer under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act is V. Verma, who can be reached at +91 93555 86167.

2. The information we collect

When you complete an application, the information you share with us may include:

• Identity and contact information about you and your co-founders, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, LinkedIn URLs, and company affiliation.
• Company information, including legal and trading name, country and date of incorporation, registered entity numbers where you provide them, Indian state or union territory, headquarters city, and current operating jurisdictions.
• Commercial information about your business, including stage of product, revenue figures where you choose to share them, customer counts, customer names where you choose to disclose them, funding history, current fundraising status, runway, defensibility positioning, and competitive context. Most of these fields are optional and you control how much you share.
• Strategic information you submit in narrative form, including team narrative, founder context, and free-text fields.
• Documents you choose to upload, such as a pitch deck.
• Sector, geographic, and priority-alignment classifications you select from menus, including which UAE national strategic priorities your company aligns with.
• Founder pedigree information you choose to share — prior employers, education, prior outcomes.
• Investor-readiness information you share — data room status, audited financials, cap table cleanliness, board composition, compliance certifications.
• Information about which UAE government, semi-government, or innovation-ecosystem entities you have previously engaged with.
• Technical information automatically captured when you use our platforms, including IP address, browser, and timestamps.

3. How we use your information

We use the information for the following purposes. By submitting your application, you consent to all of them:

1. To evaluate your application for the Start-Up Series and to communicate with you about the outcome.
2. To introduce you, where there is a clear mutual fit and aligned with your stated growth plans, to investors, corporate partners, and government and regulatory contacts in the UAE and globally. The investor and partner organisations we work with are subject to written confidentiality undertakings before any of your information is shared.
3. To share your applicant profile with ecosystem partners of the Start-Up Series who offer services, benefits, or preferential terms to applicants. These ecosystem partners fall into two categories: sponsors of the program and contracted service providers. All ecosystem partners sign a written Ecosystem Partner Engagement Agreement with us before receiving any applicant data, which limits their use of the information to the specific service the partnership covers, prohibits redistribution, prohibits cross-selling of unrelated products, and requires deletion on request.
4. To inform research and reports we may publish about the UAE-India start-up corridor and the broader founder ecosystem, in aggregated and anonymised form. Individual founders and companies are not identified in such reports.
5. To consider you for investment from program partners, on standardised terms published in advance, alongside other lead investors. Investment consideration is decided independently of program admission and is not a condition of, or a guaranteed outcome of, program participation.
6. To enrich your applicant record with information available from public sources (LinkedIn, your website, public registries, news media) for the purposes above.
7. To send you communications related to the program, to subsequent Start-Up Series programs, and to introduction opportunities you may be eligible for.
8. To meet our legal, regulatory, and tax obligations, and to defend or assert legal claims.
9. To improve our application processes and the quality of the program over time, including through decision-support tools and analytical methods that may involve algorithmic processing.
10. To transfer to affiliated, successor, or jointly-controlled entities of the program, on terms that preserve the protections of this Notice, in connection with the operation of the program or any of the purposes set out above.

4. The legal basis for processing

Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and the United Arab Emirates Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data, the lawful basis for our processing is your consent, given when you submit the application. We rely on legitimate interests for limited record-keeping and fraud-prevention purposes, where the law allows.

Where you act on behalf of your company, the company is providing commercial information that does not constitute personal data; that information is governed by the Terms of Submission rather than this Privacy Notice.

5. Who we share your information with

Where the program leads to introductions or other engagement, your information may be shared with the following kinds of organisations:

• Investor, corporate, and government partners, where we believe there is a clear mutual fit aligned with your stated growth plans. These partners receive identified applicant profiles only after they have signed a Partner Confidentiality and Engagement Agreement that limits use to screening and introduction purposes and prohibits redistribution.
• Ecosystem partners of the Start-Up Series — organisations that sponsor the program or that we have contracted with to extend services, benefits, or preferential terms to applicants. These partners may receive identified applicant profiles only after signing an Ecosystem Partner Engagement Agreement that limits their use of the information to the specific offering the partnership covers, prohibits redistribution, prohibits cross-selling of unrelated products, requires deletion on request, and requires their own privacy policy to be linked from the partners page.
• Co-investors or partners participating in a specific introduction, where you have indicated openness to that introduction or where the introduction follows from your application materials.
• Service providers who help us run the application program (form hosting, email delivery, database hosting, analytics). These providers process your information only on our instructions.
• Regulators, courts, and law enforcement where we are legally required to disclose information.
• Acquirers, successors, or affiliated entities of the program in the event of a corporate transaction or restructuring, on terms that preserve the protections of this Notice.

We do not sell your personal data. We do operate a curated introduction service and an ecosystem partner network in which your applicant profile may be shared with vetted investor, corporate, and ecosystem partner organisations, in line with the consent you give when you submit your application.

6. International transfers

Your information may be transferred to and stored in jurisdictions other than the one you are based in. In particular, applicant information is stored on servers in the United Arab Emirates and the European Union, and may be accessed by our team and by partners in those locations and in the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Singapore, and the wider GCC. Where transfers cross jurisdictional boundaries, we rely on contractual safeguards approved by relevant data protection regulators.

7. How long we keep your information

We hold applicant information for thirty-six (36) months from the date you submit your application. After that period, we delete or fully anonymise the information, except where one of the following applies:

• You have engaged with us, an investor partner, or an ecosystem partner in a way that creates an ongoing legitimate-interest record (for example, a successful introduction, a follow-on engagement, or an investment). In that case, the relevant subset of information is retained for the longer of seven years or the duration of that relationship.
• We are required to retain information by law (for example, for tax or anti-money-laundering purposes).
• We need to retain information to assert or defend legal claims.

8. Your rights

You have the following rights in respect of your personal data. You can exercise any of them by emailing privacy@startupseries.com. We will respond within thirty days, and we will not charge a fee unless your request is manifestly excessive or repetitive.

• Right of access — to obtain a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Right to correction — to have inaccurate or incomplete personal data corrected.
• Right to erasure — to have your personal data deleted, subject to the exceptions in section 7.
• Right to withdraw consent — to withdraw the consent you gave when you submitted your application. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before withdrawal.
• Right to opt out of specific ecosystem partner sharing — you can ask us not to share your profile with a particular ecosystem partner (or with any ecosystem partner) without affecting the rest of your application.
• Right to nominate — under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, to nominate another individual to exercise your rights in the event of your death or incapacity.
• Right to grievance redress — to lodge a complaint about how we handle your information, first with us at privacy@startupseries.com.

9. How we keep your information safe

We use commercially reasonable technical and organisational measures, including encryption in transit, encryption at rest for sensitive financial fields, access controls limiting internal access on a need-to-know basis, written agreements with all service providers and partners, and regular reviews of our security posture. If we become aware of a personal data breach affecting your information, we will notify you and the relevant regulator within the timelines required by applicable law.

10. Children, cookies, changes, contact

The program is intended for adult founders. We do not knowingly process personal data of individuals under the age of eighteen. If you believe we have collected such data inadvertently, please contact us at privacy@startupseries.com and we will delete it.

Our platforms use cookies and similar technologies for functional and analytics purposes; see our Cookie Policy at start-upseries.com/cookies for details and choices.

We may update this Notice from time to time. The Last updated date at the top reflects the most recent version, and material changes are notified to applicants whose information is currently held. Privacy enquiries: privacy@startupseries.com. General enquiries: info@startupseries.com.