Privacy

There is no account, no login and no form on this site that asks you for anything. There is also a session recorder running on every page, and you should know that before you read anything else here. The research portal at research.indianstartupmap.com is a separate site with accounts and payments; what it keeps is in its own section below.

The short version

We ask you for nothing and keep no database of visitors. Three analytics tools run on every page, one of which records your session as a replayable video of your pointer and taps. Our host sees every request, as any host does. Everything published about companies here comes from government records, never from you.

What runs on every page

Three third-party tags, loaded in the page head. They run on the static pages and on the company pages alike, because both are served from the same head. They do not run on a local development build.

Umami

loads from analytics.apexlayer.in

Self-hosted page analytics, run by us on our own server. It records the page URL, the referring link, your screen size, browser and operating system, and a country derived from your IP address. It sets no cookies, and by design it stores a rotating daily hash rather than your IP address, so it cannot follow you from one day to the next.

Google Analytics 4

loads from www.googletagmanager.com

Page and event analytics run by Google. Two properties exist, one per domain, and the page picks the right one from the hostname at load time. It sets cookies in your browser and Google receives your IP address with the request. Google states that it does not store that IP for Analytics and uses it only for an approximate location. That is Google saying so, not us: we cannot see inside it.

Microsoft Clarity

loads from www.clarity.ms

A session recorder. It captures pointer movement, taps, clicks, scrolling and rage clicks, and reconstructs them as a replayable recording of your visit, plus aggregate heatmaps. It sets cookies. This is the most invasive thing on the page and it deserves its own section, below.

Google and Microsoft are United States companies, so using this site sends request data to servers outside India. If that matters to you, block www.googletagmanager.com and www.clarity.ms in your browser: every page here works exactly as it does now without them.

Clarity records your session

Being blunt about this, because "we use Clarity for analytics" hides it. Clarity reconstructs your visit: where the pointer went, what you tapped, how far you scrolled, where you hesitated, and the page as it was rendered to you. Someone can sit down later and watch that back. That is the point of the tool, and it is why it is on this page: across 4,53,192 startups, watching where people give up is how the navigation gets fixed.

We have never changed its masking configuration, so it runs at Microsoft's default, which masks the text you type into form fields. The only field on this site is the search box. We do not tag recordings with any identity of our own, because we do not have one to tag them with, and we do not attempt to work out who a recording belongs to.

Cookies

We set none of our own. This site stores nothing in your browser: no cookie, no local storage, no preference, no identifier. The cookies you will find here belong to Google Analytics and to Clarity, and they exist to tell those tools that two page views came from the same browser. Clearing them resets that, and blocking them costs you nothing on this site. The research portal sets one cookie of its own when you sign in, __Host-ism_session, an opaque session id that holds nothing about you and expires after 30 days.

There is no consent banner

A deliberate choice, and an arguable one. Consent banners on sites like this are usually a dark pattern dressed as a right: a wall between you and a public record, with a pre-ticked box behind it. We would rather write this page, tell you the three hosts by name, and leave the control where it actually works, which is your browser.

So: browser tracking protection, a content blocker, or private browsing all stop these tags outright, and none of them breaks a single page here. Nothing on this site is gated behind analytics working. We do not currently act on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control headers, which is worth saying plainly rather than leaving you to assume we do.

What our host sees

The site is served by Cloudflare. Like any host, it handles every request and therefore sees your IP address, the URL, your browser string and the time, and it uses them to deliver, cache and protect the site from abuse. That processing is Cloudflare's, under their terms as our provider. We do not export those logs, join them to anything, or build a profile from them.

The search box

What you type into search is sent to our own endpoint so it can look up matching company names, and the answer is cached at the edge for an hour. We do not write your query to any database and we keep no search history. If you arrive from a link that already carries a query in the URL, that URL is a page address like any other, so it reaches the analytics tools above.

The startups are not you

Everything published about a company here comes from Indian government open data and other public sources, never from visitors. Every source is listed. We deliberately withhold one thing the sources give us: director names, which in company-registry data are frequently relatives added to satisfy the two-director rule. The registered office is different. We print the registered office as filed with the MCA, trimmed of contact details; it never appears in a report or an export, and a request from the company removes it within two working days. The methodology explains both, and a build gate greps the whole site output for director fields, PAN-shaped strings and bare mobile numbers and fails the build on a single hit.

If you are connected to a company record and want something changed or taken down, write and say which startup. We would rather fix it than argue about it.

The research portal

research.indianstartupmap.com sells reports and exports, so unlike this site it has accounts, and Apexlayer Technologies Private Limited (CIN U58201HR2025PTC135312) is the data fiduciary for what they hold. An account is an email address; you sign in with a code we email you, and there is no password to store.

When you buy something we keep: the email you paid with, the Razorpay payment id and order id, the amount and the GST breakdown, the state you gave for the invoice's place of supply, and, if you gave one, your GSTIN and billing name. Razorpay handles the card, UPI or bank transfer, and we never see a card number. We also record that you accepted the terms, when, and a hash of the IP address it came from, because a purchase is a contract and we have to be able to show it was made. If you save a search or tick the digest box, we keep the filter and the choice.

How long: invoice and payment records for eight years, because Indian tax law requires it; everything else about the account for as long as it exists and 90 days after you delete it, while billing settles. You can export everything held against your email, or delete the account, from its account page or by writing to trust@indianstartupmap.com; we finish within 30 days.

Who processes it: Cloudflare (hosting, databases, files and the funnel analytics the portal writes itself), Razorpay (payments) and ZeptoMail (the sign-in codes, invoices and reminders we email you). Nobody else, and no data broker. The portal runs no session recorder; the analytics on it are the Umami and Clarity tags named above, and this list changes only with this page.

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and the IT Rules, our grievance officer is Sachin Gurjar, Director, Apexlayer Technologies Private Limited, trust@indianstartupmap.com (or dpo@apexlayer.in), C/O WeWork India, DLF Forum, DLF Cyber City Phase III, Sector 24, Gurugram, Haryana 122002, India. Complaints are acknowledged within 72 hours and answered within 30 days. If you are not satisfied you may take the matter to the Data Protection Board of India.

Contact, and changes

trust@indianstartupmap.com reaches a monitored inbox at Apexlayer Technologies. If the list of tools on this page ever changes, this page changes with it in the same release. If you find a tag running here that is not named above, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.