What we collect, where it lives, and who can read it.

What we collect

What we collect depends on whether you are a mentor or a founder.

Account data. The information you provide when you accept an invite: a username you choose, a password (stored as a bcrypt hash, never in plaintext), your display name, your base cohort and the current cohort you are mentoring (set from your Account settings), and optionally an email address. We also record when you last logged in and whether your account is active or deactivated.

Founder accounts. If your mentor invites you to use Vector, you hold an account too, created when your mentor proposes the pairing or when you accept an invitation. It has a display name and an email address, and no password: founder accounts sign in with a passkey or an emailed link and code, never a password. If you set up a passkey, we store its public key, a counter, the device label you choose, and when it was created and last used. A passkey cannot be reversed into anything that would let us, or anyone else, sign in as you elsewhere.

Captured content. The Wisdom Cards you write through the Capture flow: the structured fields the extraction generated, the tags you set, the codename you chose for the person the reflection is about, and any files you attach. Each card has a visibility tier (Private, Shared, Public) that determines who can read it. When you share a Private card, the platform creates a new Shared card with the anonymized content; the Private original stays in your Library as a separate row.

Mentorship records. Who you are paired with (a mentor and a founder, or a coach and a client), the consent wording shown to the founder before anything is shared, the pairing's status (proposed, confirmed, paused, or ended), and the timezone used to organize weekly activity.

Shared space content. When a founder uses Vector, the messages and Lean Canvas snapshots they choose to share with their mentor, and the messages and questions their mentor writes back, are stored here, in TensorVortex's own database, not Vector's. Each item is a copy: nothing a founder writes is shared until they explicitly send it, and withdrawing an item removes its content for both people and leaves only a marker that something was shared and withdrawn.

What we do not keep. The seed reflection itself is not stored. Whatever you speak or type is sent for extraction and discarded once the draft exists. Voice capture is transcribed by your own browser, so no audio file is ever created or uploaded. If you use the guided interview, the transcript is deleted when your cards are created. Founder names, company names and fund names are removed while the card is drafted, so they are not written to the database at all, including on Private cards you never share. That removal is performed by the drafting model and is not infallible, which is why you review the draft before it is saved.

Attachments. Files you attach to your Private cards (images and PDFs up to 4 MB). Stored in a private Vercel Blob store; the file content is never served directly from blob URLs to a browser. Every attachment request passes through a proxy route that authorizes your session and streams the file bytes only to the card owner. Attachments do not propagate to the Shared tier.

Editorial signals and activity logs. Patron Mentor essential marks, Patron's Notes, references that the Ask the Network synthesizer cites in answers (logged so the card author can see their patterns travel), password reset tokens, single-use invite tokens, and a session cookie. None of this is sold, used for advertising, or shared with third-party analytics services.

Where it is stored

Account data, Wisdom Cards, editorial signals, and activity logs live in a Postgres database hosted by Neon in their US East (Ohio) region. Attachments on Private cards live in a Private Vercel Blob store, also in the United States. The platform itself runs on Vercel infrastructure. Outbound email (invites, password resets) goes through Resend; the only data passed to Resend is the recipient email address, the inviter or sender display name, and the body of the email. The AI synthesizer used for capture extraction and Ask the Network is Anthropic's Claude (currently Sonnet); only the corpus of Shared and Public-tier patterns plus the active query or seed is passed at request time. Anthropic does not retain the request payloads for training.

Who can read what

Read access is enforced by code at every fetch, not just by UI hiding.

• Private cards. Only the mentor who captured the card. No other mentor, Patron, Admin, or AI process reads the body.
• Shared cards. Every mentor in your organization. Attached files do not propagate to the Shared tier in v1.
• Public cards. Reserved for future cross-org patterns. None exist today.
• Editorial signals (essential marks, Patron's Notes). Visible to anyone who can read the underlying card.
• Reference counts. Visible to anyone who can read the card, but exclude the author's own queries from the count.

Roles and their access

Each role can only read what their role permits. The Admin role is intentionally an operations role; it cannot read any Private card content. Super Admin is a platform role; it does not browse organization libraries by default.

• Mentor. Own Library (all visibilities) and the organization Shared tier.
• Patron Mentor. Same reads as a Mentor, plus editorial write access on Shared cards (mark essential, leave Patron's Notes, demote with feedback).
• Admin. Mentor list, activity counts, invitation status. No Private card content. Bulk invites, deactivations, and org settings.
• Super Admin. Platform-level access for maintenance and organization creation.

Vector

Vector is a separate TensorVortex product that lets a founder test an idea with their mentor. A founder reaches it from their TensorVortex account; there is no separate Vector account to create.

When a founder opens Vector, we send Vector's server your TensorVortex account id, your role, and your display name. We do not send your email address, and we never send a mentor's or a founder's id or email to the other side of a pairing: each side only ever sees the other's display name. We also send the mentorship's labels (how your organization refers to a mentor and a founder), the consent wording below, and, once a pairing is confirmed, its timezone and confirmation date.

Vector's access to your account expires automatically after 15 minutes of inactivity and is revoked immediately if your account is deactivated or deleted. When you delete your TensorVortex account, or an admin deactivates it, we tell Vector within seconds so it can end your session there too, rather than waiting for access to simply expire.

The consent wording you see before sharing anything is the same wording an organization's admin and your mentor see: “Your mentor sees only what you choose to share, and when you have opened something they sent you.” For a mentoring relationship (not a coaching one), it continues: “The program team can see when you last signed in and how often you and your mentor exchange items, never what is in them.” For a coaching relationship: “Nobody at the program can see when you sign in or how you use it, or what you and your coach exchange.”

One thing stated plainly, because that wording says “never what is in them”: that describes what the product shows to a mentor, a founder, or an admin. It is not end-to-end encryption. TensorVortex's operators can technically access content stored in our database, the same as for any other data on the platform. We do not do this as a matter of course; access is restricted to what operating the platform requires.

Cookies and tracking

TensorVortex uses one cookie: a signed session token (HMAC-SHA256) that identifies your account to the middleware. It is httpOnly, SameSite=Lax, expires after 30 days of inactivity, and contains no personal information beyond your user ID. We do not use Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Hotjar, advertising pixels, fingerprinting scripts, or any other third-party analytics or tracking tools.

Anonymization on share

Names are removed earlier, when the card is drafted, so by the time you share there is normally nothing left to redact. The share pass generalizes what identifies a person in combination: an industry plus a stage plus a location, or a figure specific enough to name a company. You review the result on a side-by-side preview, you may edit the Shared version yourself before confirming, and your edits are put through the anonymization pass again on the way out. You can also preview what the Network would see without sharing. The original Private card stays intact in your Library and you remain the attributed author.

The codename you use for a person is never copied onto a Shared card. A stable label repeated across several shared cards would let a reader group them by founder, which is the thing anonymization exists to prevent.

How to delete your data

Per-card deletion. You can permanently delete any Private card you own from either the Library list (small trash icon in the corner of the card row) or the card detail page. The card row and all attached files are removed from the database and from blob storage immediately. For Shared cards, either you or the Patron Mentor of your organization can remove a pattern from the Network; your Private original is a separate row and is unaffected by that removal. A Private original cannot be deleted while its Shared copy is still live, so you never end up with a card on the Network that you no longer hold.

Account deletion, for a founder. From your Account settings, any time. Confirm with a fresh sign-in (within the last 10 minutes) or a 6-digit code we email you, and your account, your mentorships, and everything shared in them are deleted immediately. We tell Vector within seconds so it removes everything it holds for you too.

Account deletion, for a mentor, Patron Mentor, or Admin. The same immediate path is available if your account owns no Wisdom Cards. If it does, deleting it immediately would delete the cards with it, so write to support@tensorvortex.com from the email associated with your account. We will remove or reassign your cards and then permanently delete your account, your attachments, your invite records, your password reset tokens, and your session cookies within 48 hours. Shared cards you previously shared remain on the Network (attributed to you) unless you specifically ask for their removal as well.

How long we keep things

We do not auto-delete cards. Your Library is yours for as long as your account is active. Some things are deleted automatically and deliberately: the seed reflection is discarded as soon as a draft exists, guided interview transcripts are deleted when their cards are created, and single-use tokens (invites, password resets) expire and are cleaned up. Items shared between a mentor and a founder are kept for as long as the mentorship is active; a withdrawn item's content is removed immediately, and the marker that something was shared and withdrawn is removed when the mentorship itself ends. Deactivated accounts retain their data but cannot log in; if you want full deletion, ask for it explicitly.

Changes to this policy

We will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page when we change the contract. Material changes (new data we collect, new third parties we use, broader access rules) will also be announced to every active mentor and founder via the email address on file before they take effect.

Contact

For privacy questions or data requests, write to support@tensorvortex.com. For security reports, see the “How do I report a security concern?” section of the FAQ.