This Privacy Policy describes how Pillar Cos Management LLC ("Pillar VC") and Pillar Companies Management UK Limited ("Pillar UK") (together, "Pillar", "we", "us", or "our") collect, use, share, and protect your personal information in connection with the Pillar website, proprietary software platform, and the Encode: AI for Science fellowship programme (together, the "Service").
The Encode: AI for Science fellowship is operated by Pillar and funded by the UK Government through the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
If you are located in the United Kingdom, your personal data is processed in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. The provisions of this policy relating to your rights, our lawful bases for processing, international transfers, and data sharing with funders apply specifically under UK data protection law.
Pillar Cos Management LLC, 500 Boylston St, Boston, MA 02116, United States, Email: contact@pillar.vc
Pillar Companies Management UK Limited 80 Cheapside, London, EC2V 6EE Company number: 16002669
Pillar UK is the primary point of contact for UK data subjects. For any questions about this Privacy Policy or to exercise your data protection rights, please contact encode@pillar.vc.
Fellowship application data. When you apply to or participate in the Encode: AI for Science fellowship, we collect:
Website contact data. When you fill out a contact form on our website, we collect your name and email address in order to respond to your enquiry and, if applicable, to create your account.
Like many websites, we collect information through cookies and other automated means, including:
Please see our Cookie Policy for detailed information about the cookies we use and your ability to control them. Most web browsers can be set to inform you when a cookie is sent and give you the option to refuse it. Refusing cookies may affect the display or function of parts of the Service.
We may periodically obtain personal and non-personal information about you from third parties you have authorised us to access. Third-party services may install their own cookies when you integrate them with the Service. This policy only covers cookies set by Pillar. Third-party cookies are governed by the relevant third-party terms and privacy policies.
We do not intentionally collect special category data (such as data about your health, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or political opinions). If your application materials happen to contain such information, we will process it only where strictly necessary and on the basis of your explicit consent or where processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest.
Under UK GDPR, we must have a lawful basis for each type of processing. The bases we rely on are:
Purpose: Processing your fellowship application and administering the programme.
Lawful Basis: Legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) — our interest in operating the fellowship and selecting suitable candidates.
Purpose: Sharing data with our funders (ARIA and DSIT) for programme oversight, reporting, and evaluation.
Lawful Basis: Legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) — our interest in meeting obligations to funders and supporting the public interest in advancing AI for Science in the UK.
Purpose: Sharing data with non-commercial partners for programme delivery.
Lawful Basis: Legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) — our interest in delivering the fellowship programme effectively.
Purpose: Including your information in the publicly available AI for Science R&D Gaps Map.
Lawful Basis: Consent (Article 6(1)(a)) — we will ask for your explicit consent; you may withdraw it at any time.
Purpose: Including you as a named point of contact on the R&D Gaps Map.
Lawful Basis: Consent (Article 6(1)(a)) — separate, optional consent.
Purpose: Responding to website enquiries and providing the Service.
Lawful Basis: Legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) — our interest in delivering the Service to you.
Purpose: Sending fellowship-related communications.
Lawful Basis: Legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) or consent (Article 6(1)(a)), depending on the nature of the communication.
Purpose: Sending marketing communications.
Lawful Basis: Consent (Article 6(1)(a)).
Purpose: Complying with legal obligations.
Lawful Basis: Legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)).
Where we rely on legitimate interest, we have conducted a Legitimate Interest Assessment and concluded that our processing is necessary, proportionate, and does not override your rights and freedoms. You have the right to object to processing based on legitimate interest at any time.
Where we rely on consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before you withdrew.
We use the information we collect for:
The Encode: AI for Science fellowship is funded by the UK Government through ARIA and DSIT. We share certain information about fellowship applicants and participants with ARIA and DSIT for the purposes of:
The information shared may include your name, institutional affiliation, research area, ARIA Opportunity Space, and fellowship outputs. We will not share sensitive personal data with funders without your explicit consent.
ARIA and DSIT will process your data as independent data controllers in accordance with their own privacy policies and the UK GDPR. You can find ARIA's privacy policy at https://www.aria.org.uk/privacy-policy/ and DSIT's privacy notice at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dsit-privacy-notices.
We may share your data with other non-commercial partners involved in delivering the fellowship (such as host institutions, mentors, ARIA Activation Partners, ARIA R&D Creators, and programme advisors) where this is necessary for the operation of the programme. We will inform you of any such sharing at the relevant time.
In the normal course of business, we may share your information with individuals and companies (such as employees, contractors, consultants, and service providers) who perform tasks on our behalf. These parties do not have the right to use your information beyond what is necessary to assist us in providing the Service.
We may share your information where required by law, regulation, court order, or subpoena, or where we believe disclosure is necessary to comply with the law, respond to a government request, or protect the rights, property, or safety of Pillar, our users, or others.
We may share your information in the event of a corporate sale, merger, acquisition, dissolution, or similar event.
We will not share your personal information with third parties for any other purpose unless you tell us to or as otherwise described in this policy.
At Encode: AI for Science, our goal is to facilitate compatible connections between impactful research opportunities and the most capable AI researchers, to produce transformative translational research outcomes. To support this mission, we are building a publicly available resource, the AI for Science R&D Gaps Map, that gives a platform to research opportunities by highlighting R&D gaps where AI has the potential to be transformational, data resources able to empower this research, and knowledge of the researchers innovating in these areas.
We are not publicising application proposals. Instead, we identify key AI for Science R&D gaps from applications and broadly describe the landscape of opportunity.
The R&D Gaps Map may include the following high-level information derived from fellowship applications:
Application proposals, detailed methodologies, and confidential or sensitive information from your application will not be published.
The R&D Gaps Map will be published on the Encode: AI for Science website (encode.pillar.vc) and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This means the information may be freely shared, adapted, and built upon by anyone, provided appropriate credit is given.
We will only include information derived from your application in the R&D Gaps Map with your explicit consent. You will be asked to consent separately to:
Before any information is published, you will have the opportunity to review and approve the specific entry, choose whether to be named, and request changes before it goes live.
Declining will not affect your fellowship application or participation. Consent for inclusion in the R&D Gaps Map is entirely voluntary and separate from the fellowship programme.
You may withdraw your consent at any time by emailing encode@pillar.vc. Upon receiving your request, we will remove your information from the R&D Gaps Map as soon as reasonably practicable.
Please note that because the R&D Gaps Map is published under an open licence, copies of the information may have been accessed, downloaded, or redistributed by third parties before your withdrawal. We cannot control or retrieve copies that others may have made while the information was publicly available.
Pillar Inc. is based in the United States. When you submit information through our platform, your personal data may be transferred to and stored in the United States.
To protect your data when it is transferred outside the UK, we rely on the following safeguards:
[Choose the applicable mechanism(s) and delete the others:]
You may request a copy of the safeguards we use for international transfers by contacting us at contact@pillar.vc
Data shared with ARIA and DSIT (both UK-based public bodies) does not involve an international transfer.
We use reasonable security measures to store and protect information under our control and appropriately limit access to it. No system can be completely secure. Although we take steps to secure your information, we cannot guarantee that your personal information or communications will always remain secure. We will notify you by email if we have reason to believe that your personal information has been compromised due to a security breach.
Under UK GDPR, you have the following rights:
To exercise any of these rights, contact us at contact@pillar.vc or encode@pillar.vc.
Right to complain. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK's supervisory authority for data protection:
We retain your personal data as follows:
If you choose to stop receiving communications from us, we may still retain certain information for analytical purposes, recordkeeping integrity, fraud prevention, and compliance with our legal obligations.
We restrict use of the Service to individuals aged 18 and above and do not knowingly seek or collect personal information from anyone under the age of 18.
Our website may contain links to other websites with their own privacy policies. Please review the privacy policy of any site you visit. Third-party services integrated into our Service are governed by their own terms and privacy policies.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post changes on this page. If you continue to use the Service after changes have been posted, you agree to be bound by the updated policy.
Each version of this Privacy Policy will be identified by the effective date at the bottom of this page.
If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy or how your data is handled, please contact us:
Effective Date: February 15, 2026
