Privacy Policy

Last updated September 3, 2026

Tellstone Inc., a Delaware corporation ("Tellstone," "we," "us," "our"), is committed to protecting the privacy of the individuals and organizations that use our platform. This Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use, share, and protect your information when you use the Tellstone platform and services ("Service").

1. Who this policy applies to

This Privacy Policy applies to:

• Customers: Organizations (venture studios, venture capital firms, accelerators, etc.) that subscribe to the Service
• Participants: Individuals who complete assessments through the Service at the direction of a Customer
• Prospects: Individuals a Customer adds to its talent bench, who have not registered with Tellstone and have not taken an assessment
• Visitors: Individuals who visit our website or interact with our marketing content

About Prospects. A Customer can add a person to its private talent bench without that person taking part. This usually starts from a LinkedIn profile address, a meeting the Customer's team attended, or a name typed in by hand. We then collect publicly available professional information about that person, such as their headline, current role, work history, and education. A Customer's team can also record their own observations, meaning a working style, a set of short statements they pick from a fixed list, and how well they say they know the person. Those observations are that Customer's own view. We store and display them that way, not as fact and not as anything the person said about themselves. A Prospect's record is visible only inside the workspace of the Customer that added them. If you think you are on a Customer's bench, write to support@tellstone.ai to ask what we hold, correct it, or have it deleted.

2. Information we collect

Information you provide directly:

Category	Examples
Account information	Name, email address, organization name, password
Payment information	Billing details processed securely by Braintree (a PayPal service), collected only from paid subscribers. We do not store credit card numbers on our servers. Free plan accounts do not require payment information.
Assessment responses	Answers to behavioral and personality assessments, self-reported skills and experience
Profile information	Professional background, work history, education, LinkedIn profile data
Observations and outcomes	A Customer's own read on a person, meaning work style, selected statements, familiarity, and private notes. A Customer's record of what happened later, meaning whether a predicted risk came true, whether a goal was met, and whether working with a particular person went well
Communications	Emails, support requests, and feedback you send to us

Information collected automatically:

• Device information (browser type, operating system)
• Usage data (pages visited, features used, session duration)
• IP address and approximate location
• Cookies and similar tracking technologies (see Section 7)

Information from third parties:

• Publicly available professional information, such as a LinkedIn profile page or a company website, retrieved on our behalf by a search and content provider. For registered users this fills in their own profile. For Prospects it is the main source, and it is collected without that person taking part
• Meeting details from a Customer's connected Google Calendar, covering the people they met. See Section 12

3. How we use your information

We use the information we collect for the following purposes:

• Provide the Service: Generate assessments, simulations, risk analyses, and team reports for Customers
• Process payments: Manage subscriptions, billing, and invoicing
• Communicate with you: Send account notifications, service updates, and respond to support requests
• Improve the Service: Analyze usage patterns to enhance features, fix bugs, and improve user experience
• Train our models: Use de-identified and aggregated assessment data, together with the outcomes Customers record about teams and goals, to improve the accuracy of our analytical models and algorithms. Observations a Customer records about a person on their bench are never used for this
• Ensure security: Detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and unauthorized access
• Comply with law: Meet legal obligations and respond to lawful requests

4. How we share your information

We do not sell your personal information.

Each Customer's workspace is separate. We do not share one Customer's bench, observations, results or reports with another Customer. There are two exceptions. A small number of Tellstone staff can access a Customer workspace to provide support and fix problems. And an individual can choose to let a second organization see their own assessment results, which they are asked about directly and can decline. Nothing else crosses.

We share information only in the following circumstances:

• With Customers: Assessment results and simulation reports are shared with the Customer that initiated the participant's assessment, as described in our Participant Terms of Service
• With team members: Aggregated team-level insights may be shared among participants in the same project, as consented to during registration
• With service providers: We use trusted outside providers to run the Service. These include payment processing (Braintree, a PayPal service), marketing email (MailerLite), website analytics (Google Analytics), a search and content provider that retrieves public professional information, and two providers that run the analysis. We use OpenAI to read profile pages and uploaded documents. We use Amazon Web Services to generate team reports. These providers are contractually obligated to protect your data and use it only for the services they provide to us, and not to train their own models
• Through a link a Customer shares: A Customer can create a link to a team report and send it to whoever they choose, such as a co-investor or a founder. Anyone who has the link can open the report without an account, so the Customer decides who receives it. A report link stops working 30 days after it is created. Separately, a person who takes an assessment can create a link to their own results and share it themselves. That link does not expire. We record when a shared page is opened, including the viewer's IP address and browser
• For legal reasons: We may disclose information if required by law, legal process, or government request, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Tellstone, our users, or the public
• In a business transfer: If Tellstone is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to the protections in this Privacy Policy

5. Data retention

We retain your information for as long as necessary to provide the Service and fulfill the purposes described in this Privacy Policy:

• Active paid accounts: Data is retained for the duration of your subscription
• Free accounts: Data is retained for as long as your account remains active. We may delete inactive free accounts and associated data after an extended period of inactivity (12 months or more), with prior notice sent to your registered email address
• After cancellation or downgrade: Account data is retained in accordance with these policies and may be deleted upon request. When a paid subscription ends, your account reverts to a free plan and data is retained under the free account policy
• Meeting reminders: When a Customer connects a calendar, we keep a short record of the people they met so we do not remind them about the same person twice. We keep that record for as long as the Customer's account is open
• Shared links: A report link stops working after 30 days. We keep the record of the link so the Customer can see that it was opened
• De-identified data: Aggregated, de-identified data used for model training and research is retained indefinitely
• Legal obligations: Some data may be retained longer to comply with legal, tax, or accounting requirements

You may request deletion of your personal data by contacting us at support@tellstone.ai.

6. Data security

We implement industry-standard technical and organizational measures to protect your information, including:

• Encryption of data in transit (TLS/SSL) and at rest
• Secure password hashing
• Access controls limiting employee access to personal data
• Regular security reviews and monitoring

While we strive to protect your information, no method of transmission or storage is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security.

7. Cookies and tracking

We use cookies and similar technologies to:

• Maintain your session and authentication state
• Remember your preferences
• Analyze usage patterns to improve the Service
• Tell us whether an email we sent was opened and whether a link in it was clicked

You can control cookies through your browser settings. Disabling cookies may affect the functionality of the Service.

8. Your rights

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights regarding your personal data. These rights apply whether you registered with Tellstone yourself or a Customer added you to its bench.

• Access: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you
• Correction: Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete data
• Deletion: Request deletion of your personal data, subject to legal retention obligations
• Portability: Request a machine-readable copy of your data
• Objection: Object to certain processing of your data

If your information has already been used to train our models, we unlink it from you rather than remove it, because those records are used in aggregate and cannot be pulled apart.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at support@tellstone.ai. We will respond within 30 days.

9. Children's privacy

The Service is not intended for individuals under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we learn that we have collected data from a child, we will delete it promptly.

10. International users

The Service is hosted in the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you consent to the transfer and processing of your data in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your jurisdiction.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Updated policies will be posted on this page with a revised effective date. We encourage you to review this policy periodically. Your continued use of the Service after updated policies are posted constitutes your acceptance of the changes.

12. Connected tools

Tellstone offers three optional tools that let a Customer's team add a person to their talent bench from somewhere they already work. Each one is described below. Everything these tools send us is then handled as described in the rest of this Policy.

12.1 Tellstone for Chrome

An optional browser extension for Google Chrome. It adds a button to LinkedIn profile pages so a Customer's team can add a person to their talent bench and record their own observations about that person.

What the extension reads:

• The web address of the LinkedIn profile page you are viewing, in order to identify who you are adding
• The name displayed on that page, used to label the person and shown back to you before you add them

What the extension sends to Tellstone, and only when you click:

• The LinkedIn profile address of the person you chose to add
• That person's name, when it matches the profile address
• The observations you record, meaning the work style you select, the statements you check, how well you say you know the person, and any note you write

What the extension does not do:

• It does not read your LinkedIn messages, connections, feed, notifications, or account settings
• It does not run on any site other than LinkedIn, and on LinkedIn it acts only on profile pages
• It does not collect your browsing history or track the pages you visit
• It does not send anything to us, or to anyone else, unless you click the button
• It contains no advertising and no third party analytics or tracking code

How it connects: When you connect the extension from your Tellstone account, we create an access token and hand it to the extension. You do not need to copy or manage it yourself. That token is stored locally in your own browser using Chrome's extension storage. It is sent only to Tellstone, over an encrypted connection, to identify you as the person adding someone. It is never sent to LinkedIn or to any third party. You can turn off a token at any time from the Connected tools page in your bench, and removing the extension deletes the stored token from your browser.

Professional information: When you add a person, Tellstone retrieves publicly available professional information about them, such as their headline, current role, and work history, as described in Section 2. This happens on our servers and not in your browser. The extension itself does not extract that information from the LinkedIn page.

12.2 Tellstone for Slack

An optional Slack app. It lets a Customer's team add a person to their talent bench from Slack, either with the /tellstone command or by using the Tellstone shortcut on a message.

What it reads:

• Nothing, until someone deliberately uses it. The app has permission to receive its own command, to reply, and to send you a direct message. It cannot read channel history
• When you use the shortcut on a message, Slack passes that one message's text along with your request. We take a LinkedIn profile address out of it and keep nothing else from it
• Your Slack workspace and user identifiers, so we can match you to your Tellstone account

What it sends to Tellstone:

• The LinkedIn profile address of the person you chose to add
• That person's name, if you enter one
• The observations you record, meaning the work style you select, the statements you check, and how well you say you know the person

What it does not do:

• It does not read your channels, your direct messages, your files, or your workspace member directory
• It does not post into channels. Its replies are visible only to the person who asked
• It does not send anything to us unless you use the command or the shortcut

How to turn it off: Remove the Tellstone app from your Slack workspace. That ends its access.

12.3 Google Calendar

An optional connection. When a Customer's team member connects their Google Calendar, Tellstone looks for meetings they had with people from outside their own company, so it can remind them to add those people to the bench.

What it reads: Only your primary calendar, and only recent meetings. For each one it reads the meeting title, when it ended, and the attendee list, meaning each attendee's name, email address, and whether they accepted. It does not read the meeting description, the location, video call links, or any other calendar. We also read the email address of the Google account you connect.

What we record: After a meeting ends, we record that you met someone new so we can remind you once. That record holds their name, their email address, and the meeting title. We skip people you already know, anyone inside your own company, large meetings, meetings you declined, and anyone we have reminded you about before.

What you get: One reminder, by email or Slack message, sent only to you. It contains that person's name, their email address, and the meeting title. Nobody else receives it. You can turn either kind of reminder off on your Connected Tools page.

When they join the bench: Only if you choose to add them. Recording the reminder does not add anyone to the bench.

How to turn it off: Disconnect on your Connected Tools page and we stop checking your calendar. To remove Tellstone's access at Google as well, revoke it in your Google account settings.

Where the data goes

Everything these tools send is added to the talent bench of the Customer organization whose account you are using, and is subject to the same use, sharing, retention, security, and rights provisions set out in Sections 3 through 8 of this Policy.

13. Contact

For questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us at:

Tellstone Inc.
support@tellstone.ai