Taking care of your personal information

Taking care of the personal information you provide to us is so important. This privacy policy sets out how we collect, use and store your personal information – please read it carefully. For the purpose of this Policy, ‘Personal Information’ means information which can identify a living individual.

Occasionally, we may make changes to this policy so do remember to check back from time to time.

If you have any questions on this policy, or wish to change how we use your personal information, please contact our Support center (info@athenafundx.com) and we will strive to respond within two working days.

Who We Are

Athena FundX, legally registered as Athena F. Ltd, a social enterprise and a limited liability company (company number 12000198) in England and Wales. Athena FundX’s registered office is 198 Nether Street, London N3 1PE.

Athena FundX is dedicated to empowering women in the field of technology and entrepreneurship. With a strong belief in the untapped potential of women, we strive to bridge the gender gap and create a more inclusive and diverse tech ecosystem.

At the heart of our mission is the 1 Million Women in Tech Entrepreneurship Programme. This ground-breaking initiative aims to empower one million women worldwide to become successful tech entrepreneurs.

How does Athena FundX collect personal information?

Information is critical and helps us to operate as efficiently as possible and to make sure our interactions with you are timely, relevant and tailored for you. To do this, we may collect personal information about you in the following ways:

Directly from you

• 1. When you interact with us such as when you learn on our WhatsApp platform, subscribe to our newsletter or attend an event. Sometimes you might be interacting with an organisation working on our behalf, or in partnership with us but we are still responsible for your personal information.
  2. When you visit our website or WhatsApp learning platform we may gather information, such as which pages you visit, which content you are accessing or how long you spend reading a page or learning. This data helps us to improve your learning experience, for example by adding new features or content; or removing elements that make any of our platforms difficult to use. We may also use data and insights to help inform the type of founder you are in order to improve your success as a founder and inform policy. You can find out more in the section on cookies below.

Indirectly

• 1. When you interact with third parties such as when you are accessing our platform from our partner websites and give your permission for your personal information to be shared with us. Similarly, if you engage with us on social media and other messaging services like Facebook, WhatsApp or Twitter you might give us permission to access personal information from those accounts. The data we are given access to by social media services will vary but will always be in line with the terms of that service.
  2. From other information that is available to the public to help us understand more about you and ensure our communications and learning contents are tailored to you. To do this, we may use personal information from publicly available sources such as Companies House, or information published in the media, as well as that which is commercially available through third party subscriptions. By understanding more about you, and your entrepreneurship venture, we can help make our work for women and young entrepreneurs as effective and comprehensive as possible.

What personal information does Athena FundX collect?

Depending on how you interact with us, the personal information that we collect may include your name, country, email address, telephone or mobile number, social media name, your contact preferences, company registration details, information about your product, business or tech innovation including prototype details, company taxpayer status (in cases where you are accessing grants or credit from us), the company revenues, date and/or year of your birth, and gender.

We may also collect personal information about any actions you take as part of your learning journey, events that you register for or participate in, and details from any interactions with our support center.

We may also gather personal information that is publicly available to build up a better picture of you and your business interests, as well as behavioural data on digital platforms so we can consider how best to support you. To do this we do research, which may include using third-party subscriptions, to help us understand things such as the demographic information associated with your location, an estimate of your age, information about directorships and shareholdings, employment and earnings as well as your business interests and traction or history.

We do this to make sure our communications to you are appropriate and tailored – something we know means a lot to our entrepreneurs.

We may sometimes use third party suppliers to support us in this work– to understand more about this please see the section below, “Sharing your personal information”.

How we use your personal information

We will always make sure we have a lawful basis for processing your personal information.

The lawful bases that we might use depending on why and how we are using your personal information, are:

• 1. If we have your consent
  2. To enter into, or perform, a contract with you
  3. To comply with a legal duty
  4. For our own (or a third party’s) interests (known as ‘legitimate interests’)
  5. But we’ll always make sure our interests don’t override your rights (or those of a third-party)
  6. To protect your vital interests or the vital interests of another individual

very occasionally, we may need to process your personal information to protect your vital interests (for example to protect your life) or the vital interests of another individual – for instance we may escalate a safeguarding concern to local authorities urgently where an individual is believed to be at risk of significant harm or we may process personal data in order locate individuals after an unforeseen disaster.

Here are some examples of how we use personal information for different areas of our work:

1. 1. For Athena FundX’s programmes
      1. To provide you with the services, products or information you have requested, or that we feel would be of interest to you, and reasonably expected by you as you learn on any of our platforms.
      2. To send email, telephone and postal marketing about Athena FundX’s Programmes, products and services aimed at organisations.
   2. For research and analysis
      1. To build on our research about the state of women in entrepreneurship and more so, tech entrepreneurship.
      2. To carry out and analyse research surveys, focus groups or other research methods.
      3. To understand our learners or entrepreneurs better and develop entrepreneur propositions, this may involve analysing your personal information or combining it with publicly available information in order to create learner or entrepreneur ‘profiles’.
      4. To analyse and report on trends in our entrepreneurs’ behaviour that helps us to understand our entrepreneurs better, and predict future behaviour, so that we can engage with you in an appropriate and efficient way.
   3. For administration purposes
      1. To keep a record of your relationship with us.
      2. To contact you with a query about a topic or where you have contacted our support center.
      3. To process your grants or credit facility and verify financial transactions.
      4. To process an internship application or job application.
   4. For advocacy and campaigns
      1. To collect pledges of support for campaigns to stand up for women’s rights in business and technology, like petition signatures or connecting you with your MP so that you can contact them directly to act.
   5. For direct marketing
      1. To let you know by email, telephone, SMS or post the latest news about our work and share with you how else you can help, where we have a lawful basis to do so. These updates may include information on fundraising on behalf of the businesses we serve or our campaigns.
      2. Where we don’t specifically ask for your consent to do this, we believe it is in Athena FundXs legitimate business interest to let our entrepreneurs know about the latest news about our work bridging the gender gap in technology entrepreneurship and share with you how else you can help. We only do this where we don’t believe sending these will impact your privacy or cause you harm or distress; however, you can always let our support center know if you’d prefer us not to contact you in any of these ways.
      3. To analyse and improve our learning platform on WhatsApp, website, services, products or information we provide to you.
      4. To measure the effectiveness of our content or marketing campaigns, for example by telling us if you have opened a message or email we have sent you.
      5. To reach you and identify other similar people like you on social media who we believe would be interested in Athena FundX, and to show them Athena FundX content.
      6. To verify if the contact information we hold about our entrepreneurs is correct, using a third party service.
      7. You can change how you hear from us at any time simply by getting in touch with our Support center – please see the section How to change the way we contact you.
   6. For philanthropy and partnerships
      1. To collect supplementary information from the public domain such as from professional networking sites, company websites, news archives, third party paid-for sources, the Charity Commission and Companies House. This additional information we collect enables us to tailor our learning content and communications and make the most appropriate requests to philanthropies and partner organisations who may be able and willing to support the businesses in our portfolio through financial injections, market opportunities, mentorship, and other forms of support.
      2. To conduct due diligence on all our partnerships in accordance with our legal and regulatory obligations and internal risk management policies and procedures. This is to safeguard our reputation and to help us mitigate any associated risk, so if you choose to opt-out of this, we may not be able to process your partnership.
   7. For competitions
      1. To enable you to take part in our competitions.
      2. To carry out the administration of the competition
   8. For our website and WhatsApp platform
      1. To send you an email to check and see if there is any help we can give or any problems you encountered, for example when you enter information into a form on our website and start but don’t complete a course.
      2. To reach you with our revised content, latest news and information about how you can thrive as a female leader in tech entrepreneurship via online adverts on other websites, based on your visit to our website.
      3. To use chat function on our website so our support center can guide you to appropriate content and learning materials.

Changing how we use your personal information

If you wish to change how we use your personal information please contact our support center by emailing us on info@athenafundx.com.

Keeping your personal information safe

How does Athena FundX keep your personal information safe?

We make sure that appropriate physical, technical and human controls are in place to ensure we take good care of your personal information.

However, the transmission of information over the internet is never completely secure and as a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, Athena FundX cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your personal information, we make every effort to try to ensure its security both on our systems and while in transit between our systems and our partners who work on our behalf.

All staff who have access to your personal information understand the importance of keeping your information safe and secure at all times, are required to follow our internal privacy and security policies and are given training to support them in this.

We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other websites, even if you access them by using links from any of our platforms and we recommend that you check the policy of each site you visit.

We ensure that additional controls are in place for financial, sensitive and special categories of personal information (for example information about your intellectual property and your financial transactions as well as revenues), which meet regulatory and legal requirements for managing these types of information.

We may transfer personal information submitted by you to our partner organisations in other countries that may be outside the European Economic Area (EEA), or we may need to use a service provider or partner outside the EEA, which may include a country that does not have the same level of data protection as the UK. Where we transfer your personal information outside of the EEA, we ensure safeguards are in place to ensure it remains secure and adequately protected.

How long does Athena FundX keep personal information?

We will only use and store personal information for so long as it is required for the purposes it was collected for and as specified in our Retention Policy, which we review regularly. How long personal information will be stored for depends on the personal information in question and what it is being used for, as well as whether there is any legal or regulatory requirement for retaining the personal information. For instance, we hold personal information relating to:

1. 1. Entrepreneur transaction and interaction history for seven years from the last entrepreneur interaction with Athena FundX. A further 13 years of anonymised data is retained for analysis purposes. (Entrepreneurs are individuals who have had contact with Athena FundX in a capacity to learn and grow their businesses.)
   2. Philanthropy and partnership. If you join Athena FundX as a partner or philanthropic grant maker, we will retain data collected for 20 years in recognition of the long-term interactions with these types of partners.
   3. Individuals who have requested we no longer contact them for direct marketing. We will retain minimum personal information indefinitely in order to comply with the request (name, address, contact details and business details) but with increased restricted access to that personal information by Athena FundX staff.
   4. Financial data for our management accounts for ten years following the current financial year.
   5. Safeguarding concerns. Ten years from the completion of an Athena FundX safeguarding incident report, unless the incident involves Athena FundX staff where a concern or incident is proven which will be retained until the staff member reaches normal retirement age or 10 years from the date of closure of the file, whichever is the later.

How does Athena FundX manage children’s personal information?

Athena FundX is committed to processing children’s personal information legally and ensuring that children’s rights regarding the use of their personal information are upheld. At Athena FundX, a child is defined as anyone under 18 years of age. Where consent is required to process children’s personal information, we will ask the person with parental responsibility for the child to provide consent on behalf of the child if the child is under 16 years of age. When a child becomes 18 years of age, we will re-seek consent from the individual or cease processing the personal information. Sometimes we will not seek permission because we believe Athena FundX has a legitimate interest to process children’s personal information, in order to help the child build his/her venture; in those situations, we will always ensure we have carefully assessed whether our use would be fair and not override the child’s right to privacy.

Sharing your personal information

We may share your personal information with partners, agents or service providers to allow them to perform services on our behalf or to help us understand our entrepreneurs more effectively. These partners will only act under our instruction and will not use your personal information for their own purposes.

We always have contracts in place with our suppliers, which require them to comply with UK law on data protection and to have systems and processes to protect the security of your personal information. We promise to always keep your details safe and we’ll never sell or swap your personal information with any other organisation.

We may provide your email address or mobile phone number to digital advertising or social media companies who work on our behalf, such as WhatsApp,Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. This is so we can reach you and others like you with our offerings, latest news and information about how you can thrive as a female entrepreneur. This personal information is always provided in an encrypted format and is deleted immediately after use.

If you don’t want to see targeted advertising from us on social media, please refer to the instructions provided by the specific social media website or app, for example on WhatsAPP, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google.

We may disclose personal information if required to do so by law or if we believe that such action is necessary to protect and defend the rights, property or personal safety of Athena FundX, our platforms or our entrepreneurs, visitors and for other lawful purposes.

Here are some examples of the organisations with which we may share your data:

Social media partners

WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube

Technology and media partners, who help us plan and deliver a great entrepreneur experience

Twilio, Chatrace, Hubspot, Amazon AWS, Microsoft

Programme partners

Enterprise Nation, Hatch, Niyo Group, Black Valley, ColorInTech, Graça Machel Trust

Database provision

Amazon AWS

What are your rights?

You have the right to:

1. 1. Request a copy of the personal information we hold about you, and to ask us to confirm how we use your personal information (“Access”)
   2. Request that we correct the personal information we hold about you if it is not accurate, complete and up to date (“Rectification”).

Depending on why we have and use your Personal Information you may also have the following rights:

1. 1. Be informed about what we are doing with your personal information (“Informed”)
   2. Ask us for the personal information we hold about you to be erased from our records (“Erasure”)
   3. Ask us to send another organisation personal information that you have provided to us (“Data Portability”)
   4. Ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information for a period of time (“Restriction”)
   5. Object to the processing of your personal information (such as using it for direct marketing) (“Object”)
   6. Understand and input into a decision made by solely automated means if it has a legal or similarly significant effect on you (“Automated Decision Making”)
   7. Withdraw consent if that is the basis that we are relying on. We will inform you how to do this.

If you would like further information about your rights or wish to exercise them, please contact our support center at Athena FundX, by email.

If you are requesting a copy of your personal information, please put this in writing (together with proof of your identity) to our support center at the address given above. It is helpful if you explain what particular records you are seeking, but you do not have to say.

We won’t charge an administration fee for considering and/or complying with any requests to exercise your rights unless we believe the request is excessive in nature. If we are unable to fulfil your request for any reason, we will provide you with a reason as to why.

If you are not happy with the way we have handled your personal information and are unable to resolve the issue with us personally, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s independent body set up to uphold information rights.

Cookie policy

How does Athena FundX use cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your device that help us improve our website performance, that help provide you with the best experience when you visit our website and when we communicate with you. We may use both 1st party and 3rd party cookies. 1st party cookies are set by Athena FundX, 3rd party cookies are set by a partner on our behalf.

Cookies and similar technologies (such as web beacons (pixels), device fingerprinting or server logging) help us to:

1. 1. Personalise the website to your requirements. If, for example, on a previous visit you went to the 1 Million Women In Tech Entrepreneurship page, then we might find this out from your cookie and highlight particular information related to this initiative which you may find interesting, on a second visit.
   2. Avoid asking you to register or complete details twice.
   3. Estimate the number of visitors to our site, including the source and patterns relating to this traffic.
   4. Understand how visitors use the site, and how we can enhance this experience.
   5. Measure the effectiveness of our marketing communications, for example by telling us if you have opened an email we have sent you.
   6. Display relevant advertising to you when you visit other websites.

You are able to set your devices to accept all cookies, to choose the types of cookies you accept, to notify you when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time. For instructions on how to do this visit www.aboutcookies.org.uk/managing-cookies.

Please find below a table detailing the types of cookies used on our website.

Which types of cookies does Athena FundX use?

We may use both 1st party and 3rd party cookies. 1st party cookies are set by Athena FundX, 3rd party cookies are set by a partner on our behalf.

Cookie List

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:

Essential Cookies

These cookies are primarily 1st party (controlled by Athena FundX) cookies and are essential in order to enable you to move around our website(s) and use its features. Without these cookies, services like learning or signing up to an event, cannot be provided. We do not ask for your permission to set these cookies as we believe that it is in Athena FundX’s legitimate interests to set essential cookies and we do not believe that this affects your privacy rights; however, you can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies; if you do, please remember that some parts of our site may not work.

Analytics Cookies

These cookies are primarily 3rd party (controlled by our partners) and collect information about how visitors use our WhatsApp platform and website, for instance which pages entrepreneurs go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies collect information that identifies you personally. All information these cookies collect is held securely and is necessary to help you and your business venture thrive.

More questions

If you have any questions that aren’t answered on this page, please check our support center.

Changes to this policy

This information was last updated on October 10th, 2023. From time to time, we may make changes to the information on this page, so you may wish to check back regularly. The amended information will apply from the date it is posted on the site and will govern the way in which we collect and use personal information from then on.