Terms of Service

Last updated: September 2026

These terms govern your use of the Founding Hires researcher index, the website foundinghires.tech and the application app.foundinghires.tech, published by Lucas Lavielle, SIRET 999 676 836 00011, Biarritz, France. Asking for an account or using the service means you accept them. If you accept on behalf of a company, you confirm you are allowed to bind it.

They are written to be read. Where a clause matters to you in practice, we say what it means rather than only what it permits.

1. What the service does

Founding Hires indexes the published research in artificial intelligence, ranks the people behind it by the work they have published, and estimates when a doctorate ends so that you learn months ahead who is about to come on the market. You search that index by subject, save a search as an alert, and receive an email when something changes on it.

It is not a job board, not an applicant tracking system, and it does not contact researchers on your behalf. Outreach is yours to send and yours to answer for.

Our executive search service, where we run the search and present a short list, is a separate engagement covered by its own signed agreement. These terms do not govern it.

2. Your account

Access is granted per person, after a request and once a subscription is agreed. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including keeping your password and any access token private. A token grants the same access you have, so treat it like a password.

One account is one person. Sharing credentials so that several people search under a single seat is not permitted; tell us how many people need access and we will price it.

3. Price, invoicing and cancellation

Subscriptions are agreed before they start, invoiced in advance for the period, and payable within the term stated on the invoice. Prices are those of your written quote.

You may stop at the end of any paid period by telling us before it renews. We do not refund a period already started, except where the law requires it or where we close a paying account without cause, in which case we refund the unused part.

A price change never applies to a period already paid. We tell you before it takes effect on a renewal.

4. Fair use, and what you may not do

A subscription buys human use of the index. To keep the service available and to protect what took months to build, each account has a ceiling on the number of profile rows it can be served in a day. A recruiter running real searches never reaches it. Automated access is subject to the same ceiling. An account that crosses it may be paused; if that happens in the course of genuine work, write to us and we will lift it.

You agree not to:

• extract, copy or reconstruct the index, in whole or in substantial part, whether by scripting the interface or the API;
• resell, redistribute or publish what the service returns as a dataset, a directory, or a competing product;
• create several accounts to go around the ceiling of one;
• circumvent, disable or probe our limits, our authentication or our invoicing;
• use the service to send unsolicited bulk messages, or in any way that breaks the law or the terms of the sources the data comes from.

You may of course keep and use the profiles you find, for your own hiring. That is the product. The line is between using the results and taking the index.

5. Data about researchers, and your responsibility

What the service shows about a researcher comes from public sources: preprints and their metadata on arXiv, author records on OpenAlex, the academic history a person declared on ORCID, registered theses on DBLP, and pages a researcher published themselves. Every date carries the source it was read from, and, where one exists, the sentence it was taken from.

This matters for you as much as for us. When you export or keep a profile, you decide what to do with that data and you become responsible for it. Under the GDPR you act as an independent data controller from that point on. In practice you must have a lawful basis for contacting the person, tell them where you found them if they ask, honour their rights, and not use the data for anything a researcher could not reasonably expect from a recruiter.

You must not use the service, or the data it returns, to discriminate on any ground protected by law, nor to profile someone for a purpose unrelated to recruitment.

Any researcher can ask to be removed, and the link in any message we send carries that request. Removal is immediate and permanent on our side, and the record does not come back on a later pass. It cannot reach a copy you have already exported: erasing that one is your obligation.

6. Ownership

The service, its software, its scoring, its index and the way it dates the end of a doctorate remain ours. Your subscription gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use it for your own hiring, for as long as the account is active. It gives you no right over the index itself.

What you put in stays yours: your searches, your saved alerts, your notes. We do not sell them and we do not share them with other clients.

7. Availability and changes

We aim to keep the service available and accurate, and we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error free, or that a given search returns a given result. The index depends on public data we do not control, and a date is an estimate whenever the profile says so.

We may add, change or remove features. If we remove one you rely on, you may stop and we refund the unused part of the current period.

8. Liability

The service is provided as is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profits, a missed candidate, or a hire that did not happen. Our total liability towards you, for any claim, is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before it arose.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, in particular for gross negligence, wilful misconduct, or personal injury.

Hiring decisions are yours. The service surfaces public evidence of someone's work and an estimate of when they finish; it does not assess a person, and it must not be the sole basis of a decision that affects them.

9. Suspension and termination

You can ask us to close your account at any time, and we erase your data as described in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks section 4, that does not pay, or that puts the service or other clients at risk. Unless the breach is serious or repeated, we tell you first and give you a chance to fix it.

10. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, and the date at the top says when. For a change that materially reduces your rights we write to account holders at least thirty days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the new version; if you do not, you can stop.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by French law. If we cannot settle a dispute amicably, it goes before the competent French courts. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the mandatory protections of the country where you live, nor of your right to use an alternative dispute resolution body.