Startup NDA for partners, vendors, contractors and first hires

Many venture capital firms decline to sign NDAs for a first pitch. They see hundreds of companies, often in the same space, and an NDA would expose them to claims every time a portfolio company builds something similar. Asking for one at the first meeting can signal inexperience. The practical approach is to pitch with material you can afford to share, and save the detail (source code, customer lists, unit economics by customer) for due diligence.

At that later stage, especially with strategic investors, corporate venture arms and angels who are also potential competitors or partners, an NDA is more common and more reasonable. The NDA for investors template includes an investment activities clause that says the investor can keep investing in other companies and is not presumed to know what its partners saw, which is the point investors usually negotiate. Offering it up front makes the request easier to accept.

If you are not sure how long to protect information, the article on how long an NDA should last walks through typical terms by situation.

• Term. 1, 2, 3 or 5 years. Two years suits most partnership and vendor talks.
• Confidentiality after the term. A separate period in years, with trade secrets protected for as long as they qualify. Source code and algorithms should be treated as trade secrets.
• Definition. Broad, standard or narrow. A broad definition protects you more as the discloser but makes a mutual NDA heavier for both sides.
• Governing law. Any US state, Delaware by default, which many startups pick because they are Delaware corporations.
• Residuals. Lets the other side use general know-how kept in memory. Startups sharing technology usually leave it off, and larger partners often ask for it.
• Non-solicit. 12 months by default. Useful when a partner's team will work closely with your engineers.

1. Pick the template, enter your company and the counterparty, choose the purpose, term and governing law. The full agreement renders instantly.
2. Send it for e-signature. The other side gets a personal link by email and signs in the browser with a typed or drawn signature.
3. Watch it move from sent to viewed to signed and nudge if it stalls.
4. The signed PDF, with a certificate page showing timestamps, IP addresses and a document hash, is emailed to everyone and stored in your register.
5. Reminders arrive 60, 30 and 7 days before the NDA expires.

You can generate a preview on the home page without an account to see the full agreement before choosing a plan.

Large partners and enterprise customers rarely sign a startup's template. They send theirs, and a founder without counsel signs it as is. Upload it instead and run an AI review. It returns a summary, a risk score from 0 to 100 and flags with severity, such as obligations that bind only you in an agreement called mutual, a perpetual term, missing carve-outs for independently developed work, or an IP assignment or non-compete hidden inside the NDA. That last one is the clause that hurts startups most, because it can hand a partner rights in what you build next.

The Starter plan includes 10 AI analyses a month along with 25 NDAs sent, all templates, e-signature, the register, reminders and 2 team members. Yearly billing is the default and saves 50 percent.