Legal

Last updated: March 2024

Beauhurst respects your right to privacy. This Privacy Notice explains who we are, how we collect, share and use personal information, and how you can exercise your privacy rights.

This Privacy Notice applies to our collection and use of personal information in connection with: (i) your use of our website, beauhurst.com (the “Website”) and any services or features available through the Website and other interactions with you, including through social media (“Website and Social Media Data”); and (ii) our web-based private company information subscription service which includes information about different businesses and their stakeholders, including their officers and shareholders (the “Beauhurst Platform”). In this Privacy Notice, we refer to the personal information processed by us in connection with our operation of the Beauhurst Platform as “Platform Data”.

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, then please contact us using the contact details provided at the bottom of this Privacy Notice.

Quick links

We recommend that you read this Privacy Notice in full to ensure you are fully informed. However, if you only want to access a particular section of this Privacy Notice, then you can click on the relevant link below to jump to that section.

• Website and Social Media Data
  • What personal information does Beauhurst collect and why?
  • Who does Beauhurst share my personal information with?
  • Legal basis for processing personal information
• Platform data
  • What personal information does Beauhurst collect and why?
  • Who does Beauhurst share my personal information with?
  • Legal basis for processing personal information
  • Legitimate interests as our main lawful basis for the processing of Platform Data
• Cookies and similar tracking technology
• Your data protection rights
• International data transfers
• Data retention
• Updates to this Privacy Notice
• How to contact us

What does Beauhurst do?

For more information about Beauhurst please see the “About” section of our Website.

Website and Social Media Data

What personal information does Beauhurst collect and why?

The personal information that we may collect about you in connection with your use of the Website and other interactions with you, including through social media, broadly falls into the following categories:

• Information that you provide voluntarily

  Certain parts of our Website may ask you to provide personal information voluntarily: for example, we may ask you to provide your contact details in order to subscribe to marketing communications from us, book a demo of the platform, get access to a service and/or to submit enquiries to us. The personal information that you are asked to provide, and the reasons why you are asked to provide it, will be made clear to you at the point of information collection. The personal information you are asked to provide may include your name, email address and password.

• Information that we collect automatically

  When you visit our Website, we may collect certain information automatically from your device. In some countries, including in the United Kingdom and countries in the European Economic Area, this information may be considered personal information under applicable data protection laws.Specifically, the information we collect automatically may include information such as your IP address, device type, unique device identification numbers, browser type, broad geographic location (e.g. country or city-level location) and other technical information. We may also collect information about how your device has interacted with our Website, including the links clicked and pages accessed.

  Collecting this information enables us to better understand the visitors who come to our Website, where they come from, and what content on our Website is of interest to them. We use this information for our internal analytics purposes and to improve the quality and relevance of our Website to our visitors.

  Some of this information may be collected using cookies and similar tracking technology, as explained further under the heading “Cookies and similar tracking technology” below.

• Information collected from third party sources

  We may collect personal data about you for business-to-business marketing purposes from online platforms including social media such as LinkedIn. This usually involves identifying relevant business contact details which we might save on our CRM system and use to contact you by email or, for example, via LinkedIn, if we think you might be interested in a Beauhurst product.We may also collect your personal data through X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and LinkedIn when you tag us and mention us in your posts, status updates and comments through your accounts on these platforms, and when you provide us with your personal data on our accounts on these platforms, e.g. when you comment on one of our posts on Instagram or follow our LinkedIn page.

Who does Beauhurst share my personal information with?

We may disclose your personal information to the following categories of recipients:

• to our group companies, third party services providers and partners who provide data processing services to us, or who otherwise process personal information for purposes that are described in this Privacy Notice or notified to you when we collect your personal information. These include our accountants, our CRM platform, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn for purposes including payment handling, delivery of services, advertising and marketing;
• to any competent law enforcement body, regulatory agency, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary: (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person;
• to a potential buyer (and its agents and advisers) in connection with any proposed purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business, provided that we inform the buyer it must use your personal information only for the purposes disclosed in this Privacy Notice;
• to any other person with your consent to the disclosure.

Legal basis for processing personal information

Our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it.

However, we will normally collect personal information from you only: (i) where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you, (ii) where the processing is necessary for our legitimate interests, which, given the nature of the processing and the security measures we undertake, are not overridden by your data protection interests or fundamental rights and freedoms, or (iii) where we have your consent to do so. In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you or may otherwise need the personal information to protect your vital interests or those of another person. Please see below for a summary of the lawful bases and purposes for which we process Website and Social Media Data.

Lawful basis	Purpose
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Responding to queries and other communications and booking demonstrations
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Providing you or your employer with access to a service
Your consent	Using non-essential cookies and other tracking technologies on our website
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Sending you marketing communications, for example, the Beauhurst newsletter and our weekly insights and reaching out to you including via phone, email and LinkedIn for marketing purposes
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Sharing information, including personal information e.g. when we share a post that contains comments, as part of using our social media accounts to promote our offerings
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Sharing your personal information with third parties including as part of our everyday operations, for example, as part of working with suppliers
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Improving and maintaining our website, including detecting and preventing illegal activities
Compliance with a legal obligation we are under, including the implementation of appropriate measures for data security	Detecting, managing and preventing security incidents
Our legitimate interests in interacting with authorities in an appropriate way, including our commercial interests in establishing or defending our business against legal claims and otherwise protecting our reputation	Establishing, exercising or defending legal claims or otherwise interacting with courts and other authorities
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Sharing your personal information with third parties as part of a transaction relating to our business, for example, a sale or restructuring

If we collect and use your Website and Social Media Data in reliance on our legitimate interests these interests will normally include our commercial interests in operating our Website and communicating with you as necessary to provide our services, respond to your queries, improve our Website, undertake marketing and promote our offerings, or for the purposes of detecting or preventing illegal activities and interacting with authorities or facilitating a transaction relating to our business.

If we collect and use your Website and Social Media Data on the basis of the legitimate interests of a third party, these will likely be the legitimate interests of the organisation you work for including obtaining and maintaining access to our services and ensuring access to our services is not interrupted or affected by illegal activities, keeping up to date with industry developments and making more informed business decisions. These may also be the commercial interests of our suppliers and any third parties receiving Website and Social Media Data as part of a transaction relating to our business.

We may have other legitimate interests and if appropriate we will make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.

If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as of the possible consequences if you do not provide your personal information).

If you have questions about or need further information concerning the legal basis on which we collect and use your personal information, please contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.

Platform Data

What personal information does Beauhurst collect and why?

The Beauhurst Platform has been primarily built from and maintained by publicly available information.

The purpose of processing Platform Data is to allow businesses that subscribe to the Beauhurst Platform (“Subscribing Organisations”) and their clients to identify those individuals who have invested in or are involved with companies on our platform. This provides context to the wider data-set that we hold about such companies, further encouraging well-informed decision making through understanding key trends, such as gender distributions, pay discrepancies and company performance, or making more well-informed offerings of professional services and funding opportunities.

Depending on the type of services they sign up for, Subscribing Organisations can generally review information on the Beauhurst Platform and receive reports produced on the basis of information on the Beauhurst Platform.

The personal information that we may collect about you on the Beauhurst Platform broadly falls into the following categories:

• Information that you or one of your company employees provides to us voluntarily
  

  Occasionally company employees will provide us with personal data relating to themselves and their company, including names and email addresses of key personnel, so that the platform can have the most up to date and accurate data possible.If, as a company employee, you provide personal information to us about other company personnel, you confirm that you have informed them of our identity and the purposes (as set out in this Privacy Notice) for which their information will be processed. There may be circumstances in which we would tell them where we got the information from.

• Information that we obtain from third party sources
  

  The majority of Platform Data is collected from third party sources, such as official open registers, in-house research and contracted data providers (e.g. Companies House and LinkedIn ). We can provide further information on these sources on request. This data pertains to the individuals involved with ambitious companies in the UK – directors, shareholders, and key people. The data that we hold on these individuals includes names, verified business email addresses and business telephone numbers, job titles, names of companies individuals work for or have a relationship with, details of directorships and shareholdings and appointments as company secretary. We collect email addresses of employees of companies and funds from a combination of public sources and in-house research. We might also collect information relating to age, gender, nationality and usual country of residence. We use an internally developed tool, which uses a variety of third-party APIs and internal data handling tools to find and verify email addresses of the key employees at tracked companies and funds. As a result of these processes, not all the emails on the Beauhurst platform are found on publicly visible websites. We have checked that the relevant third party data providers either have your consent or are otherwise legally permitted or required to disclose your personal information to us.

• Information that we generate about you
  

  From time to time, we may generate some information about you for purposes of ensuring our records are comprehensive and allowing our clients to identify individuals that might be of interest to their business operations. This information may include whether you are a ‘key person’ at your company, or the function in which you work. We will verify this by cross-referencing between different sources such as your company’s website, your LinkedIn profile and online services for finding emails.

Who does Beauhurst share my personal information with?

We disclose Platform Data to the following categories of recipients:

• to our Subscribing Organisations, who process Platform Data in accordance with their selected usage privileges for primarily the following purposes:
  • internal evaluation in connection with making decisions to invest in or offer services or funding opportunities to one or more companies or funds included on the Beauhurst Platform.
  • taking the necessary steps to facilitate any subsequent funding arrangement or provision of services requested by any such company or fund or to deal with any queries by the relevant company or fund in respect of such funding arrangement or provision of services.
  • limited business-to-business direct marketing purposes subject to agreeing to certain constraints around such direct marketing approaches and to carrying out such marketing in accordance with applicable data protection and privacy laws.
  • disclosing Platform Data exported from the Platform on a one-to-one basis to selected clients or prospective clients for the purposes of: (i) internal evaluation by such clients or prospective clients in connection with making decisions to invest in or offer services or funding opportunities to one or more companies or funds included on the Beauhurst Platform; and (ii) taking the necessary steps to facilitate any subsequent funding arrangement or provision of services requested by any such company(y)(ies) or dealing with the company(y)(ies)’ queries in respect of such funding arrangement or provision of services (and on whom Subscribing Organisations will be obliged to impose restrictions in relation to the use and onward disclosure of such Platform Data (as per our Data Policy), including in respect of the use of email addresses).
    Our Subscribing Organisations, which range from government departments to corporate finance and legal firms, are all professional organisations that have an interest in the company ecosystem in the UK. Subscribing Organisations can access Platform Data for the duration of their subscription and must delete it after termination.
• to any competent law enforcement body, regulatory agency, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary: (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person.
• to third party service providers (as permitted by Beauhurst in writing from time to time): accountants, auditors, lawyers and other outside professional advisors; IT systems, support and hosting service providers; document and records management providers; and similar third-party vendors and outsourced service providers assisting Beauhurst or a Subscribing Organisation in carrying out business activities.
• to a potential buyer (and its agents and advisers) in connection with any proposed purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business, provided that we inform the buyer it must use your Platform Data only for the purposes disclosed in this Privacy Notice.
• to any other person with your consent to the disclosure.

Legal basis for processing personal information

The legal basis for which we process Platform Data is mainly Article 6(1)(f) GDPR – our legitimate Interests and the legitimate interests of third parties. Please see below for a summary of the lawful bases and purposes for which we process Platform Data.

Lawful basis	Purpose
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Operating the Beauhurst Platform and the provision of services to Subscribing Organisation
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Running our everyday operations, including operating and improving the Beauhurst Platform, identifying and repairing errors that impair the functionality of our systems, evaluating or auditing the usage and performance of our services, improving and designing new services, performing internal research, quality assurance, conducting data analysis and testing, running reports, maintaining records and detecting and preventing illegal activities
Our legitimate interests and those of third parties, as set out below	Sharing your personal information with third parties including as part of our everyday operations, for example, as part of working with suppliers
Compliance with a legal obligation we are under, including the implementation of appropriate measures for data security	Detecting, managing and preventing security incidents
Our legitimate interests in interacting with authorities in an appropriate way, including our commercial interests in establishing or defending our business against legal claims and otherwise protecting our reputation	Establishing, exercising or defending legal claims or otherwise interacting with courts and other authorities
Our legitimate interests, including our commercial interests in facilitating the transaction	Sharing your personal information with third parties as part of a transaction relating to our business, for example, a sale or restructuring

Legitimate interests as our main lawful basis for the processing of Platform Data

The processing of Platform Data is necessary for the effective use of the Beauhurst Platform as it enables Subscribing Organisations to identify shareholders, directors and key people of companies on the Beauhurst Platform and their relationships to other companies on that platform. Without being able to do so, the rich company and ecosystem data we hold on the Beauhurst Platform has little context for it to be used in a meaningful and relevant way.

It’s worth noting that the platform only holds basic information such as names, job titles, business emails, shareholdings and directorships that are needed to identify the relevant individuals and organisations in the high-growth ecosystem.

We rely on the legitimate interests of Beauhurst in operating the Beauhurst Platform, when processing Platform Data, including our commercial interests in providing our services and maintaining and expanding our client base.

We also rely on the legitimate interests of third parties and particularly, those of the Subscribing Organisations. There are a number of legitimate interests dependent on the effective use of the Beauhurst Platform. In particular, the Beauhurst Platform leads to a better supported company environment by ensuring that professional organisations and government bodies are better informed in the context of investment and professional services decision-making. Company representatives whose personal information is included on the Beauhurst Platform benefit from more relevant contact from our Subscribing Organisations. Such contact can ultimately help to support their professional role by leading to greater accessibility to investment and more informed professional services for the companies that they represent.

Subscribing Organisations clearly benefit from the Beauhurst Platform by being able to make well informed decisions in a variety of areas, from acquiring clients to informing their corporate strategy. Their legitimate interests include their commercial interests in using the information on the Beauhurst Platform for the benefit of their operations, including in keeping up to date with industry updates, making more informed decisions, identifying and reaching out to individuals when there is a mutual business interest or carrying out analysis on the UK corporate ecosystem, for example, in connection with differences in the treatment of genders.

All Platform Data is of a limited nature, relates to individuals in a professional capacity and is otherwise largely publicly available either under the Companies Act 2006 or by virtue of having been made public by the company in which the individuals are involved (usually via the company’s website). Consequently, the proposed use of the personal data is related to the individuals’ role within their company and is likely to elicit relevant contact within the reasonable expectations of those individuals i.e. from professional organisations offering services, funding opportunities and business connections to the company that the data subject represents.

The legitimate interests of Beauhurst and our Subscribing Organisations (as indicated above) are not overridden by any particular interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subjects included on the Beauhurst Platform, particularly taking into consideration the substantial potential professional benefits for the data subject, the fact that the processing of the relevant personal information is likely to align with the reasonable expectations of the data subject and the safeguards that we put in place, for example:

• Our Data Policy imposes strict requirements on our Subscribing Organisations’ use of data subjects’ contact details to ensure that the rights and freedoms of data subjects are protected.
• We have various other technical and organisational processes in place to reduce any risks to data subjects, such as only showing their name and company position as displayed on their company’s website or on their own professional social media page.
• Our research team takes reasonable steps to verify Platform Data and to check/update it at regular intervals.
• Our Terms dictate that, on cancellation, all Subscribers delete Platform Data exported from the Beauhurst Platform and requires certain contractual restrictions to be placed on use of any Platform Data disclosed to Subscribing Organisations’ clients.

If you have questions about or need further information concerning the legal basis on which we collect and use Platform Data, please contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.

Cookies and similar tracking technology

We use cookies and similar tracking technology (collectively, “Cookies”) to collect and use personal information about you. A Cookie is a small file that resides on your computer’s hard drive and often contains an anonymous unique identifier and is accessible only by the web site that placed it there, not any other sites. For further information about the types of Cookies we use, why, and how you can control Cookies, please see our Cookie Notice.

Your data protection rights

You have the following data protection rights in connection with Website and Social Media Data and Platform Data:

• If you wish to request access to, or correction, updating or deletion of, your personal information, you can do so at any time by contacting us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
• In addition, you can object to processing of your personal information, ask us to restrict processing of your personal information or request portability of your personal information. Again, you can exercise these rights by contacting us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
• You have the right to opt-out of marketing communications we send you at any time. You can exercise this right by clicking on the “unsubscribe” or “opt-out” link in the marketing emails we send you. You may also update your email preferences to choose the types of emails you receive. To opt-out of other forms of marketing (such as postal marketing), then please contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
• Similarly, if we have collected and processed your personal information with your consent, then you can withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.
• You have the right to complain to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your personal information, though we would ask that you try to solve any issue with us directly first. In the United Kingdom, the data protection authority is the Information Commissioner’s Office (https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/).

We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

International data transfers

Your personal information may be transferred to, and processed in, countries other than the country in which you are resident. These countries may have data protection laws that are different to the laws of your country.

Specifically, our Subscribing Organisations and third party service providers (e.g. HubSpot) and partners operate around the world. This means that when we collect your personal information we may transfer it or make it available to any of these countries.

We are under specific obligations to only share personal information outside of the United Kingdom and/or the European Union when there is an adequacy decision from the European Commission and/or the government in the United Kingdom (as applicable) for the country the data is transferred to or, alternatively, if other appropriate safeguards are in place. We have taken appropriate safeguards that require data recipients to protect your personal information in accordance with applicable data protection laws. These include implementing the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses for international transfers of personal information and/or the UK addendum to the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses.

The relevant Standard Contractual Clauses can be found here and the UK addendum can be found here.

Data retention

We retain personal information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so. Please note:

• If you sign up for marketing emails from us we retain your personal data until you opt out of receiving such communications using the “opt-out” or “unsubscribe” link provided in such communications. In such circumstances, we retain a suppression file that contains the details necessary to ensure that we continue to respect such opt-out.
• If you register for a demo and do not subsequently subscribe to the Beauhurst Platform on behalf of your organisation, we retain your details for 24 months after any interaction with you.
• Details of an individual’s involvement with a company on the platform will remain visible for the duration that it is in the public domain.

Your information may be retained for longer, for example to provide you or your organisation with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements. It may also be retained for shorter periods if required to do so by applicable law. When we have no ongoing business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymise it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

Updates to this Privacy Notice

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time in response to changing legal, technical or business developments. When we update our Privacy Notice, we will take appropriate measures to inform those impacted, consistent with the significance of the changes we make. We will obtain your consent to any material Privacy Notice changes where this is required by applicable data protection laws.

You can see when this Privacy Notice was last updated by checking the “last updated” date displayed at the top of this Privacy Notice.

How to contact us

If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, please contact us using this form.

The data controller of your personal information is Business Funding Research Ltd (CHID: 07312969), which is registered with the ICO with registration number Z291194X.