What we do with the information you send us when you apply, and what you can ask us to do with it.
This notice covers this Request for Proposals. The Astralis Foundation privacy notice covers the rest.
1 Who is responsible
Three organisations run this Request for Proposals together, and all three are responsible for your data as joint controllers:
- Astralis Foundation, a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales, company number 15917880
- Stiftelsen Astralis, a foundation registered in Sweden, organisation number 802482-2317
- Macroscopic Ventures, an association registered in Switzerland, CHE-455.562.321
- Throughout this privacy notice, “we” refers to the group of people involved in the RfP from the above organisations and our external advisors.
The three of us share responsibility equally. We run the round out of shared channels and systems, so we all see the same applications and the same assessments.
2 Data we collect
Nearly all of it comes from you, through the application form. This includes:
- Your name and email, who you are applying with or on behalf of, your role, and any LinkedIn or personal page you give us
- Everything you write about your proposal, including the jurisdictions and regions involved
- The amount you are asking for, in what currency, your budget breakdown, and what you told us about your other funding options
- Anything you upload, including CVs and budget spreadsheets
- Whether you asked us to treat part of your application as confidential, and whether you are happy for us to refer it onwards
- How you heard about the round, including who referred you if you tell us
- Our own record of the assessment — scores, comments, recommendations, declared conflicts, and the decision
If you name other people in your application, please make sure they know, and point them at this page. We usually have no way of telling them ourselves.
3 How we process your information and why
Our purposes and the legal basis for each, under UK and EU GDPR regulations
| What we do | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Read your application, take advice on it, and decide whether to fund it | Legitimate interests. We cannot assess a proposal without reading it. |
| Email you about it, ask follow-up questions, and tell you the outcome | Legitimate interests. You approached us and you are owed an answer. |
| Run eligibility, sanctions and due diligence checks before we fund anything | Legitimate interests, and legal obligation where the check is one a funder in our position has to make. |
| Agree and administer a grant, if we make you one | Contract, or the steps leading up to one. Where the grant is to an organisation rather than to you, legitimate interests. |
| Keep the financial records behind a grant | Legal obligation under UK and Swedish accounting law. |
| Pass your application to another funder if we cannot fund it ourselves | Consent. You choose in the form, and you can change your mind by emailing us to request this. |
| Work out how this round went and run the next one better | Legitimate interests. We use aggregate numbers wherever they will do. |
You may request that we delete your data at any point. Note that we won’t be able to make further decisions on your application if you request this.
4 Who sees your application
- A small team across Astralis Foundation, Stiftelsen Astralis, and Macroscopic Ventures, who run and review the round
- A limited number of external advisors with relevant expertise. They are bound by confidentiality and have to declare conflicts, and they see only what they need to
- Other funders, but only if you said we could refer your application, and only where the fit is plausible
- The companies whose software we use, listed below
- Our auditors, professional advisors, regulators, and lawyers, in instances where we must share data for compliance or legal reasons
If you flag part of your application as confidential, we keep it out of the advisor views and limit it to the core team. Say so in the confidentiality question on the form, or email us.
We do not sell your data, will not market to you, and we do not put you on a mailing list.
5 The systems we use
In order to assess your application properly, we use the software listed below. These companies process your data on our instructions and are not allowed to use it for their own purposes.
| Company | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| MiniExtensions | The application form, email submission confirmation | United States |
| Airtable | The database holding applications, uploads, scores, and comments | United States |
| Anthropic | Infrastructure and project support, including automatically categorising applications by theme, jurisdiction, and likely reviewer | United States |
| Email for correspondence, Docs for writing and knowledge sharing | United States and EU | |
| Slack | Facilitates organising and internal discussion of applications | United States |
All applications will be reviewed by a human. No decisions on applications will be taken by AI.
Some of this takes your data outside the UK, the EEA and Switzerland. Where it does, we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, or an adequacy decision, depending on the company. Ask us and we will tell you which applies to which.
6 How long we keep your information
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Unsuccessful applications and anything you uploaded | 24 months from the day we tell you the outcome, then deleted. |
| A bare record that you applied — name, organisation, date, outcome | Kept longer, so that if you apply again we know, and do not put you through the same questions twice. |
| Funded applications and the grant file | The life of the grant plus seven years, which is what UK and Swedish accounting rules between them require. |
| Emails about an application | 24 months from the most recent correspondence. |
| Aggregate numbers about the round | Indefinitely, since anonymised information is no longer personal data. |
Ask us to delete your application sooner and we will, unless we have to keep it for compliance or legal reasons, or to defend a claim.
7 Please leave sensitive information out
We do not ask about health, disability, beliefs, political opinions, trade union membership, ethnicity, sexual orientation or criminal convictions, and we do not need any of it. Please keep it out of your answers and your uploads.
If it ends up in there anyway, we will treat it as part of your application, keep it to as few people as possible, and delete it when we delete the rest. If something of that kind genuinely bears on your proposal, email us rather than putting it in the form.
8 What you can ask us to do
Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask us to:
- send you a copy of what we hold about you
- correct it, if we have it wrong
- delete it, unless we have a good reason to keep it
- stop using it while we sort out a disagreement about it
- stop altogether, where we are relying on legitimate interests. Tell us why, and we will unless we have compelling grounds not to
- hand it over in a portable format, where that right applies
- take back consent you have given, in particular to referring your application on. That does not undo anything already done, and a referral already made cannot be pulled back
None of this costs anything and we aim to answer within a month. We may check who you are first. A copy of your file will not normally include which reviewer said what, or anything that would give away someone else’s personal data.
9 Contact and complaints
Email middle-powers-rfp@astralisfoundation.org, with “Data protection” in the subject line.
If you are dissatisfied with how we are handling your data, we would rather you came to us first and gave us the chance to fix it. It is within your rights to complain to a regulator. Depending on where you are, that is the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK, the Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten in Sweden or your own national authority elsewhere in the EU and EEA, or the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner in Switzerland.
10 Changes to this notice
If we change how we handle applicant data during this round, we will change this page and the date at the top. If the change matters and affects applications already in, we will email applicants.
Questions about your data
If anything here is unclear, or you want to know what we hold about your application, write to middle-powers-rfp@astralisfoundation.org.
Astralis Foundation and Macroscopic Ventures