Privacy Policy

Who runs this site

Venture Atlas (ventureatlas.org) is published by an independent individual creator (ApoStructura) on a non-commercial basis. For anything related to this policy or your data, contact apostructura@gmail.com - we respond within 30 days.

Traffic measurement (what we collect)

This site measures its traffic on its own servers, at the network edge, rather than with third-party tracking scripts. For each request we record: the page path, the referring site, your country and city (derived from your connection by our hosting provider), your browser family and device class (phone, tablet, desktop), and the time of the request. A small first-party script on the page tells the same server when the page has loaded and when you open another page of the site through an in-site link; it sends only that page path and sets no cookie. While a page is open and in view, the same script also tells the server about once a minute that it is still open, and says so when you switch away, close it or stop using it for a few minutes; this shows how many people are on the site at that moment and sends nothing else. We also count the language your browser asks for, which page you went to next, and a few named actions (creating an account, starting a checkout, searching, saving a favorite, sharing or capturing a chart, downloading a file, with its file name, and following a link to another website, with its domain only). These are tallies, never a record of what one person did.

To count visits and returning visitors without identifying anyone, each visitor is assigned a pseudonymous identifier: a salted SHA-256 hash computed from the site, your IP address, and your user-agent string. Your raw IP address is not stored by the analytics - only the irreversible hash. We cannot use it to identify you, and we do not try to.

The same system classifies non-human traffic (search-engine crawlers, AI assistants, automated agents) by user-agent so we can tell people apart from bots. Requests are also logged briefly in our hosting platform's runtime logs (path, user-agent, classification) for operations and debugging.

Retention: daily aggregate counters are kept for 90 days. Once a month is over, its totals are folded into a monthly summary (counts by page, country, referring site and kind of visitor, plus an estimate of how many different visitors there were) that is kept long-term and holds nothing about any individual visit or visitor. Per-visit session records expire after 48 hours, the record of who is on the site right now (the hashed identifier and a time) is deleted within three minutes of your last page in view, and the per-visitor visit count (the hashed identifier and a number) expires 90 days after the last visit. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used and keeping it secure (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)). The site also uses Vercel Web Analytics, a cookie-free, aggregated page-view counter provided by our hosting platform.

The public API and MCP server

Venture Atlas offers a public JSON API and an MCP server. To protect the service from abuse, requests to the MCP endpoint are rate limited by client IP address in short fixed windows; these counters are transient (they expire within minutes) and are used for nothing else.

Cookies and local storage

Browsing the public site sets no cookies. Your light or dark theme choice is saved in your browser's local storage and never sent to us. If you create or log into an Atlas account, we set one strictly necessary httpOnly session cookie (userToken) so you stay signed in on this site. Because we use no non-essential cookies, there is no cookie banner.

Optional Atlas account

An Atlas account is optional. Creating one stores your email, username, password hash, and (if you subscribe) billing status in a shared Neon database used by every Atlas site. The same credentials work on sibling Atlas sites; there is no cross-domain single sign-on, so each site keeps its own session cookie. Transactional emails (verification, password reset, account deletion) are sent from no-reply@ventureatlas.org. Existing Venture Atlas pages stay public and ungated.

Signed-in users can save up to 10 pages (companies, industries, products) to their account and follow them on a private dashboard; those choices are stored in the same shared database and deleted with the account. The optional email brief is off by default and strictly opt-in: turn it on and we email you, at most once a week, only when your saved pages have news or page changes. It is not a newsletter, requires a verified address, and every brief carries a one-click unsubscribe link that works without logging in.

Atlas accounts on this site are in beta. Signup and billing may still change, a subscription does not unlock extra pages, and tax collection is not enabled yet.

Third parties (processors)

Service providers process data on our behalf, under their own data-processing agreements: Vercel (Vercel Inc., USA) hosts the site, serves it from its edge network, and provides the cookie-free web analytics mentioned above; as the host, Vercel processes connection data (including IP addresses) to deliver the site, as any web host does. Upstash (Upstash Inc., USA) is the database where the aggregated traffic counters, hashed visitor identifiers, and transient rate-limit counters described above are stored. If you create an account, Neon (Neon, Inc., USA) stores the shared Atlas users table; Resend (Resend, Inc., USA) sends transactional mail such as verification and password-reset messages; and Stripe (Stripe, Inc., USA) processes payments if you subscribe.

We do not sell, rent, or share your data with anyone else, and no advertising or marketing service receives anything from this site.

Your rights

Under the GDPR and similar laws you have the right to access, rectify, and erase personal data about you, to object to processing, and to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority (in France, the CNIL - cnil.fr). Because our analytics stores only irreversible hashes, we generally cannot link any stored data back to you as an individual, which also means there is usually nothing identifiable to retrieve or erase. For any request, write to apostructura@gmail.com.

Hosting (legal notice)

This site is published non-professionally by an individual. Host: Vercel Inc., 340 S Lemon Ave #4133, Walnut, CA 91789, United States - vercel.com.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top of this page will be updated. The current version always lives at ventureatlas.org/privacy.