Using this platform

These are the rules for using this platform, and a plain statement of what Atlas will and will not do. Atlas is a startup initiative founded by two students, Bobby Yu at the University of Surrey and Ramit Sachdev at Ashoka University, on a single mission: to empower entrepreneurship. Startup Ashoka 2026 is where that work begins for us, and we built and run this platform to serve it.

These are not the rules of the competition. Startup Ashoka 2026 is the flagship annual event of the InfoEdge Centre for Entrepreneurship at Ashoka University. The rules, the deadlines, the judging, the prizes and who wins are all the Centre’s, and the Centre has the final word on every one of them. We are grateful to the Centre for the opportunity to serve its flagship event, and where this page and the Centre’s rules ever seem to disagree about the competition, the Centre’s rules are the ones that count. Atlas is not part of the Centre or of Ashoka University.

People the Centre has registered for Startup Ashoka 2026, plus the organisers, staff and judges the Centre and Atlas appoint. Participants sign in with Google, using the Ashoka address the Centre registered. An address the Centre has not registered is refused, and so is a registered participant whose payment the Centre has not yet marked as verified: the sign-in page says so, and the door opens by itself once that comes through. Organisers may do either, and judges and administrators are given a separate username and password on accounts Atlas creates. The sign-in page labels that second box Judges & organisers for exactly that reason.

• One account, one person. Please do not sign in as somebody else, do not let somebody else use your account, and do not try to make a second one.
• Be yourself. Your name comes from your registration. Do not pretend to be another student, a member of staff, a judge, or anyone from Atlas or the Centre.
• If you think you are signed in as the wrong person, stop and tell us. A typo on a registration form can put one student’s details against another student’s email address. There is a sign-out button on every screen of the sign-up flow and on your Profile tab for exactly that, and it is not your fault.

The code of conduct is the one of these three pages most worth reading in full, and it is part of these rules. The list below is the platform-specific part of it.

• Do not use the platform to harass, threaten, demean or single out anybody, whether in a bio, an idea, a team name or an invitation message, all of which other people read.
• Do not post anything unlawful, obscene, defamatory, or that invades somebody else’s privacy, and do not post another person’s personal details.
• Do not post work, text or images that belong to somebody else and that you have no right to use.
• Do not send invitations in bulk to people you have no intention of teaming up with. There is a daily cap, shared between invitations and requests to join, and it exists for a reason.
• Do not try to reach data that is not yours, such as other people’s contact details, other teams’ work or the organisers’ screens, and do not probe, scrape or attack the platform. If you find a way to do something you should not be able to do, please tell us at admin@itsatlas.org. We would much rather hear it from you, we will not come after you for looking, and we will thank you for it.
• Do not do anything that would make the competition unfair. If you are unsure whether something counts, please ask the Centre before rather than after.

Some of what you type is read by other participants: your bio, your idea if you choose to show it, your team’s name, what your team is building, and the message you attach to an invitation or to a request to join a team. Please write it as something other students will see, because they will.

All of it is checked against word lists before it is stored, and the check works in two different ways.

Refused outright

Short, hand-picked lists, and the one for a message aimed at one person is the stricter of the two: abuse and profanity that would only get a public team name marked will stop a message being sent at all, because the person you sent it to would have read it before anybody could review it. If your bio, your idea, your team name, what your team is building, or a message you attach to an invitation or a request to join matches the list that applies to it, the text is not accepted at all. You are told that the wording cannot be accepted, and not which word it was.

Marked, but published

A longer list that blocks nothing, and it applies to your bio, your idea, your team name and what your team is building, not to the message on an invitation or a request, because the person you sent one to would have read it long before anybody looked. The text goes live and a mark is recorded. A marked team name or team description is shown to organisers in their console, alongside a control to clear it.

Every one of these lists is deliberately blunt and deliberately short, because a list that blocks aggressively gets ordinary Hindi words and Indian names wrong. They will miss things, and they will occasionally catch something entirely innocent.

You cannot change your team’s name yourself, an organiser does it. That is worth knowing before you name a team in a hurry. An organiser can also change a name that should not stand, and either way the change is recorded against the person who made it.

What Atlas needs is the narrow permission to run the platform: to store what you write and to show it to the people this platform is designed to show it to, and, if hand-in screens are built before the event, to pass your team’s submission to the Centre after it. That is the whole of it, it covers nothing else, and it ends when your data is deleted on 31 October 2026.

The platform holds no files today, as there is no upload of any kind on it. If hand-in screens exist by then, what your team submits goes to the Centre, because it is the Centre’s competition and the Centre keeps the entries. What the Centre then does with it is between you and the Centre. Anything you have put in an account of your own elsewhere stays yours and untouched.

The other side of the same coin, said so that it is on the record rather than assumed: the platform’s own source code and design belong to Atlas, and the Centre has full use of the platform for this event and for its records of it. Neither touches your work.

We will try hard to keep it up, especially on the night of 25–26 September, but we are not promising that it will be. It runs on services we do not own, over a network we do not control, and it is maintained by two people. There is no uptime guarantee here and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

If it goes down during the event, please watch the event’s own channels rather than this page: in the room, and in the event’s WhatsApp community, which the organisers will invite you to. They will tell you what is happening and what to do, including how to get your work in if the platform cannot take it.

This platform is temporary and is meant to be. It exists for one event. Everything Atlas holds is deleted on 31 October 2026 and the platform is retired. There is no exception and no second date. The privacy notice sets out exactly what that covers.

An organiser can switch off an account being used to harass somebody, to break these rules or the code of conduct, or to interfere with the platform or the competition. It is done by a named person, and the platform records who did it and when.

What it does

Access ends immediately. The platform stops recognising the account, including its access to a team and to teammates’ contact details. You also come out of your team, and out of the participant list.

What it does not do

It deletes nothing you wrote or gave us. Your registration, your profile, your idea and your messages all stay exactly as they are. It is also not itself a decision about the competition, which is the Centre’s to take. But you cannot use the platform while it is off, and the competition runs through the platform, so in practice it stops you taking part until it is lifted or the Centre says otherwise.

What happens to your team

You come out of it, and any invitation you had out or waiting for you is cancelled. If you owned the team, somebody else in it becomes the owner, and if you were the only person in it, the team is closed.

How you would find out

The platform will not email you and cannot tell you why. If you had already signed in, signing in still works and you land back on the sign-in page, which says the account is on hold and points you at an organiser. If you had never signed in, sign-in is simply refused, with the same message somebody genuinely not yet registered would see. So if you are told you are not on the list and you believe you should be, please ask rather than assume. The platform will not show you a reason. The organiser who switched the account off can leave a private note explaining why, which other organisers can read, but you will not see it here. Ask them.

If it is reversed

Your access comes back. Your place in your old team does not, because the seat is given up when the account is switched off, and rejoining is an ordinary invitation decided by whoever holds the team then.

If you think it is wrong

Message an organiser directly, in the event’s WhatsApp community, first. It is the fastest route and it reaches somebody who can look at it straight away. Directly, rather than in the group: the code of conduct explains why the community is a good place for a question and a bad one for a concern about a person. Otherwise write to entrepreneurship@ashoka.edu.in or admin@itsatlas.org. A person will look at it, and the Centre decides. We are not going to describe a formal appeals process, because a two-person team running a one-night event does not have one and inventing one would be worse than saying so. Where a decision touches your studies or your standing at the University, the University’s own appeal routes apply and are not ours to describe.

Accounts also get switched off for ordinary reasons that are nobody’s fault, such as a duplicate registration, a withdrawal, or a test account being cleaned up.

Stop using it, and ask us to delete what we hold. Either address in section 12, at any time, with no reason needed. It does mean you cannot use the platform afterwards, and the competition runs through it, so this is in practice how you withdraw. Whether you stay registered with the Centre is between you and the Centre.

One thing to know first, because it cannot be undone: if you own a team, leaving affects your teammates. We will tell you what it does before we do it.

That we will build and run this carefully, tell you the truth about what it does, fix what we can, and say so plainly when we cannot. It is a promise about effort, not about outcome. Nobody at Atlas can guarantee the platform will work perfectly on the night, and we are not going to claim otherwise in a document you might one day need.

The platform is provided as it is, with no warranty of any kind. We do not promise it is free of faults, that it will suit any particular purpose of yours, or that everything on it is accurate. Much of what it displays about the event comes from the Centre, and we publish that rather than originate it.

Atlas is a startup initiative run by two students. It is not a registered company, it carries no insurance, and it has no capacity to underwrite anything. We are telling you that here rather than letting you find it out at the point where it would matter.

So we are not able to compensate you for lost work, a missed deadline caused by an outage, a competition result, or anything you might have gone on to earn. What we will do is everything we reasonably can to put a problem right, and be straight with you and with the Centre about what happened.

The event is at Ashoka University, the participants are its students, and the platform’s database sits in Mumbai. We have written this page to Indian law, and anything about the competition itself is for the Centre and the University to resolve first. We are not asking you to agree to be sued somewhere far away, and we are not naming a court.

This is version 1.3, published on 18 September 2026. Version 1.2 was published on 3 September 2026, version 1.1 on 26 August 2026 and version 1.0 on 21 August 2026. What changed in 1.3 is summarised at the top of this page. Nothing these rules require of you changed in it; the only version to change a rule is 1.2, where sections 7 and 8 stopped saying that leaving, or having an account switched off, leaves your place in the competition untouched, because the competition runs through this platform. The rest is correction. If we change these rules again we will say so here with the date and what changed, and if a change matters we will tell participants rather than relying on you noticing.

The Centre

InfoEdge Centre for Entrepreneurship, Ashoka University, entrepreneurship@ashoka.edu.in, for the competition, your registration, your entry, and anything you want taken further than Atlas.

Atlas

Bobby Yu and Ramit Sachdev, admin@itsatlas.org, for the platform itself, your data, and anything you have found that we would want to know about.

The other two pages are the privacy notice and the code of conduct. The code of conduct is part of these rules.