Terms of Service.

1. Who we are, and what this agreement covers

vettedstartup.com is operated by RHXO Technology, LLC, a New Jersey limited liability company ( “Vetted Startup”, “we”, “us”). These terms govern your use of the website, the marketplace, the discussion forums, the affiliate programme and every related service.

By creating an account, submitting a listing, making an offer or otherwise using the service, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

Adding a startup does not require an account. If you submit a listing without one, these terms still apply to that submission.

2. Definitions

• Listing: a page describing a startup, whether added by its owner, added by a third party, or discovered and published by us.
• Seller: a user offering a startup for sale through the service.
• Buyer: a user making an offer on a listing.
• Verified revenue: revenue figures we read directly from a revenue platform using credentials the listing owner connected. See “What verified revenue means, and what it does not”.
• Escrow provider: Escrow.com, the licensed third party that holds and disburses transaction funds.
• Transaction agreement: any letter of intent, asset purchase agreement or other contract between a buyer and a seller. We are never a party to one.

3. Accounts

You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract. You are responsible for everything done under your account and for keeping your credentials secure. Tell us promptly at legal@vettedstartup.com if you believe your account has been used without your authorisation.

One person or entity, one account, unless we agree otherwise in writing. You may not transfer an account to anyone else.

4. What we do, and what we do not do

We provide a technology platform. We publish listings, verify revenue figures where a listing owner connects a revenue platform, let buyers and sellers find and talk to each other, and pass a transaction to the escrow provider when both sides choose to use one.

We are not a party to any transaction agreement. We do not negotiate on anyone’s behalf, we do not draft, interpret or enforce a transaction agreement, and we do not represent either side.

We are not a broker, an agent, a fiduciary, an adviser, or an escrow agent. Nothing on the service is legal, tax, accounting, financial or investment advice. Nothing we publish is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

We do not hold transaction funds. Funds for a sale conducted through the service are held and disbursed by the escrow provider under its own agreement with you. See “Offers, agreements and escrow”.

We do not guarantee anyone’s performance. Not that a seller owns what they are selling, not that they will transfer it, not that a buyer will pay, and not that either party will behave lawfully or honestly.

5. What verified revenue means, and what it does not

When a listing owner connects a revenue platform, we read revenue figures from that platform using read-only credentials and display what it reports, converted to US dollars. That is the entire scope of the word “verified” on this service.

A verified badge means only this: at the time of the last successful sync, a revenue platform reported those figures for that account. A badge is removed automatically when a connection stops working or its data goes stale.

We do not verify, and make no representation about:

• ownership of the startup, its code, its domain, its accounts, or its brand;
• whether any intellectual property is owned, licensed, or infringing;
• liens, security interests, debts, taxes, disputes, or claims affecting the startup;
• code quality, security, or the absence of malicious or unlicensed code;
• expenses, profit, margin, customer counts, churn, or any figure a user typed in;
• compliance with any law by the startup or by its operator;
• future performance of any kind.

Listings we discovered and published ourselves carry no revenue figures at all until an owner claims them and connects a platform. Anything a user typed into a listing is that user’s statement, not ours.

Buyers are responsible for their own due diligence. A verified badge is not a substitute for it and is not intended to be relied on as one.

6. Listings, and what a seller promises

By publishing or claiming a listing, you represent and warrant that:

• you own the startup or are authorised to list and to sell it, and you are authorised to use every credential you connect;
• everything you state in the listing is accurate and not misleading, including any figure we do not verify;
• you will keep the listing accurate, and will correct or remove it when it stops being so;
• you have the right to grant us the licence in “Your content, and the licence you give us” for everything you upload.

Connecting credentials you are not authorised to use, or misrepresenting ownership, results in removal of the listing and may result in termination and referral to law enforcement.

We may remove, edit, decline, or stop displaying any listing at any time, including one we published ourselves. If you own a startup we listed and you want it removed, write to legal@vettedstartup.com and we will remove it.

7. Offers, agreements and escrow

An offer made through the service is an expression of interest. It creates no obligation on either side. A binding sale exists only when a buyer and a seller enter a transaction agreement between themselves.

Funds are held by Escrow.com, not by us. When both parties choose to transact through the service, we create a transaction with the escrow provider and the parties contract directly with it. The escrow provider holds the funds, decides when its conditions for release are met, and disburses them, under its own terms and its own licences.

Fund disputes are resolved with the escrow provider, not with us. Any dispute about funds, their release, their return, or the timing of either, must be raised with the escrow provider under its dispute process. We have no authority to release funds, to withhold them, or to decide who is entitled to them, and we will not attempt to.

We do not mediate or arbitrate disputes between users. A disagreement about what was promised, what was delivered, or the quality of either, is between the buyer and the seller under their transaction agreement.

Transfer of the startup and its assets happens directly between buyer and seller. We are not involved in it, we do not verify that it happened, and we do not hold anything in transit.

We may say that a sale happened. Where one completes through the service we may publish that fact and the listing it relates to. We will not name the buyer or the seller, and we will not publish the price, unless that party has agreed to it in writing.

8. Fees

Our fee for a sale closed through the service is 5% of the sale price, payable by the seller out of the sale proceeds. It is calculated when the offer is accepted and does not change afterwards, even if we change our published rate in the meantime.

The escrow provider charges its own separate fee for holding and disbursing the funds. Its fee, and how it is split between the parties, is shown in the transaction before either party agrees to it. That fee is the escrow provider’s, not ours.

Listing a startup is free. Browsing, discussion, following and alerts are free. We will give notice before introducing any charge for something that is free today.

Fees already earned are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise.

9. Transacting outside the service

You are free to deal with anyone you meet here directly and to settle between yourselves. We do not prohibit it and we do not require you to use our escrow flow.

A payment made outside the service carries none of its protections. There is no escrow, no licensed third party holding the money, and no record we can produce. We accept no responsibility for anything that happens in a transaction we were not asked to facilitate.

Our fee still applies where we made the introduction. If a buyer and a seller were introduced to each other through the service, our fee remains payable on a sale of that startup between them, or between their affiliates, completed within 12 months of that introduction, wherever and however it closes. The seller owes it, on the same terms as a sale closed here.

If you close a sale outside the service, tell us within 30 days at legal@vettedstartup.com. We are not asking you to transact here. We are asking not to be cut out of an introduction we made, which is the only thing we charge for.

This does not apply to anyone you already knew, or found anywhere else, before the service introduced you.

10. Affiliate programme

If you refer a buyer who completes a purchase through the service using your referral link, you may earn 50% of our fee on that sale. A referral is attributed to the link that brought a new account to the service; an existing user arriving through a link is not a referral.

Payouts are made after the sale completes and our fee is received. We may withhold or reverse a payout where the referral was self-dealing, misrepresented us, was generated by spam or by paid search on our brand terms, or where the underlying sale is reversed or disputed.

Attribution is determined by our own records. Figures shown in your dashboard are an estimate of what you may earn, not a statement that it is owed. A commission is owed only once the sale completes and our fee is received.

We may require tax documentation before paying you, and identity documents where we are required to verify who we are paying. In the United States that means a Form W-9, or a Form W-8BEN outside it. We will not pay a commission until we hold what the law requires us to hold, and a refusal to provide it forfeits the payout.

You must not describe yourself as us, imply we endorse you, or make any claim about a listing on our behalf.

11. Automated access, feeds and AI training

You may read this service, link to it, and quote from it with attribution. You may use any machine-readable feed we publish for its stated purpose, within any rate limit we publish.

Without our prior written permission, you must not:

• copy, extract or reconstruct any substantial part of our catalogue, whether by scraping, by a published feed, by an API, or by hand;
• use content from this service to train, fine-tune, ground, evaluate or populate an AI model, a dataset, a search index, or an automated content generator;
• republish our listings in bulk, including as a directory, a mirror, a feed, or pages built for search ranking;
• resell or sublicense access to anything you obtained here.

Publishing something for machines to read is not a licence to take all of it. The compilation of listings, and the work of assembling and verifying it, is ours. A single listing’s facts are not ours to withhold and we do not claim them; the collection is a different thing. Where we publish a feed intended for AI agents, its own stated terms govern what may be done with it.

Breach of this section ends your access, and it survives the end of your account.

12. Copyright complaints

We respect copyright and we respond to notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If you own copyright in something published here, or act for the owner, send a notice to copyright@vettedstartup.com, or by post to RHXO Technology, LLC, 35 Hudson St, Jersey City, NJ 07302, containing:

• your physical or electronic signature;
• identification of the work you say is infringed;
• identification of the material complained of, with enough detail for us to find it, which normally means the page address;
• your name, postal address, telephone number and email address;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent, or the law;
• a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or authorised to act for them.

We will remove or disable access to material that is the subject of a complete notice, and we will tell the person who posted it. They may send a counter-notice meeting the same statutory requirements, and if they do we may restore the material after ten business days unless we are told a court action has been filed. A notice sent in bad faith carries liability under the same statute, so do not send one to remove criticism.

This is for copyright. To report anything else, including a listing about a startup you own, a comment, or an inaccuracy, write to legal@vettedstartup.com or use our contact form. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

13. Your content, and the licence you give us

You keep ownership of what you post. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for display, and publish it in connection with operating and promoting the service, including in search results, social previews and machine-readable feeds.

The licence continues for content that remains published after your account closes, such as a comment others have replied to. Deleting your account does not oblige us to remove content that has become part of a public conversation, though we will disassociate it from your identity on request where we can.

14. Discussions, moderation and reports

Every listing has a public discussion. Keep it civil, keep it on topic, and do not post anything unlawful, defamatory, harassing, deceptive, or someone else’s confidential information.

A listing owner cannot delete comments on their own listing. They can reply, they can post updates, and they can report a comment to us. Removal is ours alone. A seller who could delete criticism of a startup they are selling would make every discussion on the service worthless.

We may remove content or suspend accounts at our discretion. We are not obliged to monitor discussions, and we are not responsible for what users say. To report content, including content about a startup you own, write to legal@vettedstartup.com.

15. Prohibited conduct

You must not:

• connect a credential you are not authorised to use;
• misrepresent ownership, revenue, or any material fact about a startup or about yourself;
• manipulate rankings, upvotes, views or any signal, including with multiple accounts, automation, or paid engagement;
• scrape the service, or use automated means to access it beyond our published feeds;
• circumvent a security or rate-limiting measure, or attempt to access data that is not yours;
• use the service to launder money, evade sanctions, or finance anything unlawful;
• use it to compile a competing directory of the listings we publish.

16. Our intellectual property

The service, its design, its code, its brand, and the compilation of listings are ours or our licensors’. These terms grant you no right to use our name or marks except to refer to the service factually.

17. Disclaimers

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, that data will be accurate or current, that a listing is genuine, that a user is who they claim to be, or that any transaction will complete.

Information published on the service comes substantially from users and from third parties, including revenue platforms whose data we pass through. We are not responsible for its accuracy beyond the narrow scope described in “What verified revenue means, and what it does not”.

18. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill, or the cost of substitute services, however caused and on any theory of liability.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the service, or to any transaction, is limited to the greater of (a) the fees we actually received from you in respect of the transaction complained of, and (b) one hundred US dollars.

In particular, and without limiting the above, we are not liable for: the conduct of any buyer, seller or other user; any transaction agreement or its breach; the transfer or non-transfer of any asset; the accuracy of anything a user stated; any act, omission, delay or decision of the escrow provider or of any payment provider; or any payment made outside the service.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions. Where that applies to you, these exclusions apply only to the extent permitted.

19. Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, demand, loss, liability, cost and expense, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of or relating to: your use of the service; anything you published, stated or represented; any transaction you entered or failed to complete; your breach of these terms; and your violation of any law or of anyone’s rights.

20. Disputes with us, arbitration, and class waiver

Please read this section carefully. It affects how you can bring a claim.

Before starting any formal proceeding, you agree to contact us at legal@vettedstartup.com with a written description of your claim and to give us 30 days to resolve it informally. Many disputes end here.

If it is not resolved, any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will be settled by final and binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, before a single arbitrator, in English, seated in the State of New Jersey, United States. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

By agreeing to these terms, you are giving up your right to bring a claim against us in court, and you are giving up your right to have a judge or a jury decide it. Instead, a neutral arbitrator decides, and the arbitrator’s decision is final. You are also giving up your right to appeal, except on the narrow grounds the Federal Arbitration Act allows. Arbitration is a less formal process than a lawsuit and there is normally no pre-trial discovery of the kind a court permits. We are giving up the same rights.

Claims must be brought individually. You and we each give up any right to bring or to take part in a class action, a collective action, a consolidated action, or any other representative proceeding, whether in arbitration or in court. The arbitrator has no authority to combine claims or to preside over any form of representative action. If a court decides this paragraph cannot be enforced for a particular claim, that claim alone proceeds in court and everything else stays in arbitration.

If 25 or more claims of a substantially similar kind are filed by or with the coordination of the same counsel, they will be administered in batches of no more than 50, with the outcomes of the first batch available to inform resolution of the rest. Filing deadlines are paused for claims awaiting their batch. Nothing here prevents any individual claim from being heard.

Exceptions. Either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court in the state and federal courts located in New Jersey if it qualifies. Either party may ask a court for an injunction to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property or confidential information. Where a claim is not arbitrable, or to enforce an arbitration award, the exclusive venue is the state and federal courts located in New Jersey, and both parties consent to personal jurisdiction there.

Time limit. A claim must be brought within one year of the events giving rise to it, or it is permanently barred, to the extent the law allows.

Under the AAA’s Consumer Arbitration Rules, if you are an individual consumer, the AAA’s published fee schedule caps your share of the filing fee and we pay the remainder of the arbitration costs. You may choose to have the arbitration conducted by telephone, by video, on written submissions, or in person.

21. Suspension and termination

You may close your account at any time from your dashboard. We may suspend or terminate access at any time, with or without notice, including where we believe you have breached these terms or where continuing would expose us or other users to risk.

Sections 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 21 survive termination, as does any obligation to pay a fee already earned.

22. Changes

We may change these terms. Material changes take effect 14 days after we post them, and we will note the new date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the service after that is acceptance. A change never applies retroactively to a transaction whose economics were already fixed.

23. Governing law and general

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Jersey, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, and by the Federal Arbitration Act as to “Disputes with us, arbitration, and class waiver”. Subject to that section, the exclusive venue for any dispute is the state and federal courts located in New Jersey.

If any provision is held unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets. There is no third-party beneficiary to these terms. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us on this subject.

Questions: contact us. Formal notices under these terms: legal@vettedstartup.com, or RHXO Technology, LLC, 35 Hudson St, Jersey City, NJ 07302.