POPIA privacy notice
Who processes your information
founderr operates this platform and is the responsible party for the personal information processed here, as defined in the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). We are based in South Africa and the platform is aimed at South African founders, operators and investors.
All privacy and data protection requests are handled through our contact form, which routes to our Information Officer.
What we collect
We collect only what the platform needs to work:
- Account details: your name, email address and password credentials (passwords are stored as salted hashes by our authentication provider, never in readable form).
- Profile details you choose to publish: role, company, stage, city, bio, links and contact preferences.
- Company verification data: the work email address you submit and a one-time verification code, used only to confirm the email belongs to the company you listed.
- Activity data: meetups you RSVP to, events you host and messages you send us.
- Membership and payment records: subscription status, renewal dates and payment confirmations. Card details are entered on the payment provider's own pages and are never received or stored by founderr.
- Technical data: standard server and security logs such as request times, IP-derived data and error traces used to keep the service available and secure.
Why we process it (lawful basis)
We process personal information to create and operate your account, to run the member directory and meetups, to verify company email addresses you ask us to verify, to take and manage membership payments, to answer your messages, to protect the platform against abuse and fraud, and to comply with legal obligations.
Depending on the activity, our justification under POPIA is performance of our agreement with you, your consent (which you can withdraw), our legitimate interests in running and securing the platform, or compliance with law.
What other members can see
Your profile is visible to signed-in members only — the directory is not open to the public or to search engines.
Attendee lists on meetups show first names only, so surnames are not exposed by an RSVP.
Member contact details are gated behind a paid membership and are released through controlled server-side lookups, not by exposing the underlying database to browsers.
You control what goes on your profile. Anything you publish there can be seen by other signed-in members, so please do not publish information you would rather keep private.
Sharing with operators (third parties)
We use a small number of service providers who process personal information on our instruction, under contract, and only to deliver the service:
- Cloud hosting, database and authentication infrastructure that runs the platform.
- Payfast (Payfast by Network) for card and EFT membership payments and recurring billing.
- An email delivery provider for transactional email such as verification codes, password resets and notifications.
- An AI provider that powers the in-app assistant. The assistant is instructed to answer platform, billing and event questions only and not to disclose members' personal information.
Cross-border transfers
Some of these providers process data outside South Africa. Where that happens we rely on section 72 of POPIA and use providers that are contractually bound to protect the information at a level comparable to POPIA.
How long we keep it
We keep your account and profile information for as long as your account exists. If you delete your profile, we remove or anonymise your account and profile data. Records we are required to keep — for example payment and tax records — are retained for the period the law requires, and security logs are kept for a short period for investigation purposes.
Children
The platform is intended for adults doing business. We do not knowingly create accounts for children under 18. If you believe a child has registered, contact us and we will remove the account.