Privacy Policy

Anchor Angels is an angel network for the Vanderbilt community, operated by Anchor Angels, a 501(c)(6) member-based professional association (“Anchor Angels”, “we”, “us”). This policy covers anchorangels.com, the member platform, our emails and the Anchor Angels connector for Claude (together, the “Services”).

We are based in Nashville, Tennessee. You can reach us about privacy at hello@anchorangels.com.

Information you give us.

• Account details: name, email address, password (stored as a hash by our authentication provider) and your role on the platform.
• Profile details: phone, company, occupation, LinkedIn URL, city, state and region, Vanderbilt relationship, school, degree and graduation year, profile photo, and investing interests such as stages, sectors, past investment count and amounts, and goals.
• Investor information: whether you are an accredited investor and which accreditation criteria you meet, as you state them.
• Applications: founder applications (company name, website, sector, stage, region, what you are building, the problem you solve, logo and pitch deck) and investor or associate membership applications (experience, investment range, interests and reasons for joining).
• Documents and deal content: pitch decks, data room documents and other files you upload, and the notes, tasks, votes, RSVPs and chat messages you create in the platform.
• Messages you send us through the contact form or by email.

Information collected automatically.

• Usage data: pages viewed, features used, device and browser type, referring page, and approximate location derived from IP address.
• Email engagement: whether our emails are delivered, opened or clicked, which we use to keep lists healthy and to calculate a member engagement score.
• Shared document views: when someone opens a document through a share link, we record the link used, the visitor’s email if the link requires one, IP address, browser user agent, visit times, and which pages were viewed and for how long.
• Error and performance data, including session replays, described under Analytics, monitoring and cookies.

Information from third parties.

• Google: if you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address and profile picture from Google.
• Polar: our payment processor tells us the status of your subscription (plan, billing interval, renewal and cancellation dates). We do not receive or store full card numbers.
• Research providers: when our team reviews a company, we may look up publicly available information about the company and its founders using Exa (web search) and Apollo (professional and company profiles). These lookups cover professional history and company information only.

• To run the Services: create and secure accounts, apply role-based access, process applications, and host deals, data rooms, events and committee votes.
• To connect founders and members: share founder applications, decks and deal materials with members of the network who are permitted to see them.
• To manage memberships and billing, including checking subscription status before granting paid features.
• To send email: account and transactional messages, event and deal announcements, digests and newsletters, subject to your email preferences.
• To provide AI features such as deal scorecards, document extraction, search and chat, described below.
• To understand and improve the Services, fix errors, and prevent abuse, fraud and security incidents.
• To meet legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.

The platform uses AI models to help our team and members review deals. When a pitch deck or data room document is uploaded, or when someone runs a scorecard, asks the deal chat a question or uses an in-app agent, relevant content is sent to these providers:

• Anthropic (Claude) reads documents, extracted data and deal records to produce scorecards, summaries, extracted fields and chat answers.
• OpenAI converts document text into numerical embeddings so the platform can search documents by meaning. The embeddings and text chunks are stored in our database.
• Exa and Apollo receive company names, websites and founder names when an agent researches a company. Results are stored for reuse for a limited period so the same lookup is not repeated.

We use these providers under their commercial API terms, under which they do not use our inputs to train their models by default. AI output can be wrong, and it is used to assist human review, not to make decisions on its own. We keep a record of each AI run (what it processed, the model used and what it produced) so results can be checked.

Members can connect Claude (for example Claude Code, Claude Desktop or claude.ai) to Anchor Angels through our Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. You authorize the connection by signing in and approving it on our consent screen.

• The authorization asks only for your identity, email address and basic profile (the openid, email and profile scopes).
• An authorized client can read what you could read in the app, and nothing more: deals and documents you have access to, pipeline summaries, record search results and your notifications. Staff accounts can also read tasks, notes, applications, deal activity and committee votes.
• The only actions a client can take are two staff-only operations: running a deal scorecard and changing a deal’s stage. Member accounts cannot make changes through the connector.
• Information returned to Claude is then processed by Anthropic under your own agreement with Anthropic, not this policy.
• You can disconnect an app at any time from Profile, Connect Claude. Disconnecting stops its access immediately.

We do not sell personal information. We share it only as follows.

• Within the network: founder applications, pitch decks and deal materials are shared with members whose role and access allow them to see that deal. Staff can also see your RSVPs, votes and investment interest.
• Member directory: signed-in investors, associates and committee members can see other active members’ name, company, role, LinkedIn URL and profile photo. Contact details (email and phone), dues and engagement data are visible only to Anchor Angels staff. To leave the directory, turn off “Show me in the member directory” on your profile page. Staff can still see your profile.
• Through share links: people with access to a deal can create links to specific documents for outside recipients. Links can require an email address or password, expire, and block downloads. The link creator can see who viewed a document and for how long.
• Service providers who process data on our behalf, listed in the next section.
• Legal and safety reasons: when required by law, or to protect the rights, property or safety of Anchor Angels, our members or others.
• A change of control: if the organization is reorganized, merged or its assets transferred, information may transfer as part of that transaction, subject to this policy.

• Supabase: database, authentication and file storage for accounts, profiles, uploaded decks and data room documents.
• Vercel: website and application hosting, and privacy-focused page analytics.
• Google: optional sign-in with a Google account.
• Polar: subscription checkout, billing and payment processing. Polar handles your payment details under its own privacy policy.
• Resend: sending email and reporting delivery, opens and clicks.
• PostHog: product analytics.
• Sentry: error monitoring, performance tracing and session replay.
• Anthropic: AI analysis, scorecards and chat.
• OpenAI: text embeddings for document search.
• Exa and Apollo: company and founder research lookups.

We use a small number of cookies and similar technologies:

• Essential cookies keep you signed in (Supabase authentication cookies) and remember interface choices such as whether the sidebar is open. Staff support sessions use a signed cookie. These are required for the platform to work.
• PostHog stores an identifier in your browser’s local storage and records page views and feature usage. When you are signed in, we link that activity to your account ID, email and role.
• Sentry records errors and performance data and, for a sample of sessions and for sessions where an error occurs, a replay of page interactions to help us fix bugs. Replays mask text and form inputs by default. Error reports can include your account identifier and IP address.
• Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights measure page visits and load performance without cookies.

You can block or delete cookies and local storage in your browser settings. Blocking essential cookies will prevent you from signing in.

We send transactional email (account, application, billing and security messages) and, where you have not opted out, marketing email such as newsletters, digests, event invitations and deal announcements.

Every marketing email includes an unsubscribe link and a link to your email preference center, where you can choose which kinds of email you receive. We stop sending to addresses that bounce permanently or report our email as spam. Transactional messages continue while you have an account.

We keep account and profile information while your account is active. Applications, deal records, documents and votes are kept for as long as needed to run the network and keep an accurate record of deals reviewed.

When you ask us to delete your account, we delete or de-identify your personal information within 30 days, except where we must keep it for legal, tax, accounting or security reasons, or where it is part of a record other members rely on (for example a vote on a closed deal). Stored research lookups expire and are refreshed on a schedule. Backups are overwritten on our providers’ normal cycles.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• access the personal information we hold about you;
• correct inaccurate information;
• delete your information or your account;
• receive a copy of your information in a portable format;
• object to or restrict certain processing; and
• withdraw consent where we rely on it, such as marketing email.

You can update most profile details yourself from your profile page and manage email from the preference center. For anything else, email hello@anchorangels.com. We will verify your request and respond within the time the law requires. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights.

We protect information with role-based access controls and row-level database security, private file storage, encrypted connections, hashed passwords and share-link passwords, signed links, and audit logging of sensitive actions. No system is perfectly secure. If you believe your account or data has been compromised, contact us right away.

The Services are intended for adults and are not directed to children under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

We are based in the United States, and our service providers process data in the United States and other countries. If you use the Services from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your country.

We may update this policy as the Services change. We will post the new version here with a new “Last updated” date and, for material changes, tell members by email or in the platform before the change takes effect.

Questions or requests about privacy can go to hello@anchorangels.com or write to Anchor Angels in Nashville, Tennessee. See also our Terms of Service.