1. What Cogently Is — And Is Not

Cogently uses artificial intelligence to review pitch decks. It returns a score, identifies objections an investor might raise, suggests rewrites, and simulates investor questioning.

Cogently is not an investor, broker-dealer, placement agent, investment adviser, accountant or law firm. Nothing it produces is investment, legal, tax or financial advice, an offer or solicitation of securities, or a prediction of whether you will raise money.

2. Eligibility and Accounts

• You must be at least 18 and able to form a binding contract. If you use the Service for a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.
• Keep your credentials secure. You are responsible for activity under your account. Tell us promptly at hello@cogently.app if you suspect unauthorised access.
• One account per person. Do not share logins — use the team seats in §7 instead.
• You may use the preview audit on our home page without an account. Everything in these Terms still applies when you do.

3. AI Output — Limitations You Are Accepting

This section matters more than any other. Please read it.

• Output is generated, not verified. Language models produce plausible text. They can be confidently wrong, invent figures, misread your deck, or contradict themselves between runs.
• The same deck can score differently on different runs. Scores are directional signals, not measurements.
• Benchmarks are approximations. Where we reference market standards or comparable rounds, treat them as illustrative, not as verified market data.
• Investor personas are simulations. They do not represent any real firm or individual, and no real investor has reviewed or endorsed your deck.
• Nothing here is a guarantee of funding. A high score does not mean you will raise, and a low score does not mean you will not.
• Apply your own judgement, and take professional advice before relying on any output in a financing decision, an investor communication, or a regulated disclosure.

4. Your Content

• You keep ownership of everything you submit. We claim no rights in your deck, your business or your ideas.
• You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit and process your content solely to operate the Service for you — including sending it to the AI providers named in our Privacy Policy. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for backups pending routine deletion.
• We do not train AI models on your content, and we do not use one customer's deck to inform another's audit.
• You confirm you have the right to submit what you submit, and that doing so breaches no NDA or third-party right.
• Do not submit material you are not free to disclose, personal data about others, or regulated data such as health records or payment-card numbers.
• Keep your own copies. We are not a backup service and are not liable for loss of your content.

5. Acceptable Use

You must not:

• Reverse engineer the Service, or attempt to extract prompts, model weights or underlying systems.
• Scrape or bulk-download the Service, or use it through automated means beyond ordinary use.
• Resell, sublicense or white-label output as your own product, or use the Service to build a competing product.
• Circumvent usage limits, rate limits, paywalls or the preview-audit allowance, including by cycling accounts or IP addresses.
• Submit unlawful, infringing, malicious or deliberately misleading content.
• Use the Service to generate materials intended to defraud investors.
• Interfere with the Service's operation or security, or probe it without written permission.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach this section, without refund.

6. Plans, Billing and Refunds

• Free tier. A limited allowance so you can evaluate the Service. We may change or withdraw it at any time.
• Paid plans. A one-time Single-Deck Pass, a monthly Founder plan, and a Team plan. Current pricing is on our pricing page.
• Auto-renewal. Subscriptions renew automatically at the then-current price until cancelled. Cancel any time from billing settings; cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period and you keep access until then.
• Refunds. Charges are non-refundable except where required by law or at our discretion. Because output is delivered immediately and cannot be returned, we do not refund for dissatisfaction with a score or verdict. If the Service materially failed to deliver what you paid for, email us — we will look at it properly.
• Price changes apply from your next renewal, with at least 30 days' notice.
• Failed payment. We may suspend paid features if a charge fails and is not resolved.
• Prices exclude tax unless stated. You are responsible for any applicable tax.
• Payment is processed by Stripe under their terms. Chargebacks raised without first contacting us may result in termination.

7. Teams and Seats

• Team plans let you invite collaborators and co-founders. The account owner controls membership and is responsible for their use.
• Anyone you invite can see decks shared into that workspace. Only invite people entitled to see the material.
• Removing a member ends their access to shared decks but does not retract anything they already saw or exported.

8. Our Intellectual Property

The Service, its software, prompts, scoring methodology, design and the Cogently name and logo are ours or our licensors'. These Terms grant you a limited, revocable, non-transferable right to use the Service — nothing more. You may use the output of your own audits freely, including commercially.

9. Feedback

If you send us suggestions, we may use them without restriction or compensation. This does not give us rights to your deck or business information.

10. Third-Party Services

The Service integrates Stripe, Google, Apple, LinkedIn and others. Your use of those is governed by their terms, and we are not responsible for them. If you connect a third-party account you authorise us to interact with it as described in-product, and you can disconnect at any time.

11. Availability

We aim for high availability but provide no uptime guarantee. We may modify, suspend or discontinue features, and will give reasonable notice before discontinuing something material to a paid plan. We are not liable for downtime caused by third-party providers, including our AI and infrastructure vendors.

12. Termination

• You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time.
• We may suspend or terminate for breach of these Terms, non-payment, or where required by law — immediately for §5 breaches, otherwise with reasonable notice.
• On termination your licence ends and your content is deleted per the retention schedule in the Privacy Policy. Export anything you want to keep first.
• Sections 3, 4, 8, 13, 14 and 15 survive termination.

13. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty as to the accuracy, reliability or completeness of AI output. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will improve your fundraising outcomes.

14. Limitation of Liability

• To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost funding, lost business opportunity, lost investor relationships, or loss of data.
• Our total aggregate liability is capped at the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or (b) US$100.
• Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud or death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

15. Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold harmless Cogently, Stryker Capital LLC and their officers, employees and agents from any claim, loss, liability or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your content, your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, your violation of law, or your reliance on AI output in a financing or business decision.

16. Governing Law and Disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Nevada, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Please contact hello@cogently.app first — most issues resolve quickly. Any dispute not resolved within 30 days shall be finally settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules, seated in Clark County, Nevada, on an individual basis only. Class, collective and representative actions are waived to the extent permitted by law. Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, and either may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or confidential information.

17. General

• Changes. We may amend these Terms; material changes take effect 30 days after notice. Continued use is acceptance. If you object, stop using the Service and contact us about a pro-rata refund of any unused prepaid period.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger or sale of assets.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and where applicable the Affiliate Program Terms, are the whole agreement between us.

18. Contact

hello@cogently.app · Stryker Capital LLC, 7995 Blue Diamond Rd, Las Vegas, NV 89178, USA.