SMERT Academy — Terms of Enrolment

1. Who we are and what you are enrolling in

These Terms of Enrolment ("Terms") are between you (the "Participant") and SMERT.AI Limited, a company incorporated in Hong Kong with its lab and registered office at 14/F Foo Hoo Centre, 3 Austin Avenue, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong ("SMERT", "we", "us"). They apply as soon as you pay a deposit or tuition for either programme below, and they govern your participation in it.

Robotics & AI Intensive — 12 weeks, hybrid, 12 hours a week of hands-on lab time at our Tsim Sha Tsui R&D lab plus 8 hours a week of AI-assisted coding. Maximum 5 participants per cohort. Next cohort starts 5 October 2026.

HK Immersion Residency — 4 weeks full-time, 8 hours a day (160 hours in total) at the same lab, working alongside the SMERT engineering team. Maximum 3 participants per cohort. Next residency starts 15 October 2026.

We may adjust the timetable, the order of modules or the specific hardware used if it improves the training or if equipment, staff or a vendor visit becomes unavailable. The total contact hours and the substance of the programme will not be reduced without your agreement or a proportionate refund.

2. What we deliver

We commit to providing, for the duration of your programme:

• Supervised hands-on time on live SMERT cobot cells — Huayan E15 Pro arm and, subject to availability, the HY7 humanoid.
• Use of the lab kit during sessions: NVIDIA Jetson Orin edge compute, Intel RealSense 3D cameras, grippers and safety hardware.
• Access to the SMERT digital-twin simulator and to the course materials for the duration of the programme.
• Direct mentoring by SMERT engineers, and for the Residency, work alongside the team on real deployments (client-confidential work may be excluded or anonymised).
• Factory and partner visits where a vendor confirms them — these depend on third parties and are not guaranteed.
• A SMERT Academy Certificate of Attendance on completion, subject to the attendance requirement in section 6.

3. What we do not promise

We would rather be plain about this than have you assume something we do not offer.

• SMERT is not a school registered under the Education Ordinance (Cap. 279) and these programmes are not registered courses under the Non-local Higher and Professional Education (Regulation) Ordinance (Cap. 493). They are private, in-house industry training run by a technology company.
• The certificate is a private certificate of attendance issued by SMERT.AI Limited. It is not an academic degree, a diploma, a licence or a professional qualification, and it carries no credit at any university or accreditation body.
• No employment is guaranteed. Strong participants may be considered for a paid R&D role at our lab; that is a possibility, never a commitment.
• We do not control the Hong Kong Government's Research Talent Hub or any other funding scheme, and cannot guarantee that any employer, salary subsidy or grant will be approved.
• We do not guarantee visa approval. All immigration decisions rest solely with the Hong Kong Immigration Department (section 7).
• We do not promise any commercial, business or income outcome from the training.

4. Fees and the payment schedule

Robotics & AI Intensive: HK$128,888 tuition, or HK$108,888 early bird while the first 2 full-tuition seats of the cohort remain unsold. Seat deposit HK$10,000.

HK Immersion Residency: US$25,000 tuition. Seat deposit US$5,000.

The deposit reserves your seat and is credited against your tuition. The remaining balance is due within 7 calendar days of the date your deposit is paid, or before your cohort starts if that date comes sooner. If you pay the full tuition at checkout there is no balance and no further payment.

If the balance is not paid by the due date we will contact you first and give you a reasonable opportunity to settle it. If it remains unpaid after that, we may release your seat to the waitlist and retain the deposit as a cancellation fee — it compensates us for holding one of only 5 (Intensive) or 3 (Residency) seats. You may ask us in writing, before the due date, for a short extension or an instalment arrangement; we will consider it in good faith.

Payment is by card through Stripe (HKD for the Intensive, USD for the Residency) or by bank transfer against an invoice issued by SMERT.AI Limited. Bank charges, card fees and currency-conversion costs applied by your own bank or card issuer are yours. Prices are exclusive of any tax that may be chargeable in your own country.

Prices in force at the time you pay your deposit are the prices that apply to you. A later price change does not affect a seat already reserved.

5. Cancellation, transfers and refunds

The rules below are the whole policy. They are deliberately symmetric: if we let you down, you get everything back.

• Cooling-off: if you cancel in writing within 14 days of paying your deposit AND more than 30 days before your cohort starts, we refund everything you have paid, deposit included.
• You cancel more than 30 days before the start (outside the cooling-off period): we retain the deposit and refund 100% of any tuition you paid above it.
• You cancel 8 to 30 days before the start: we retain the deposit and refund 50% of any tuition paid above it.
• You cancel 7 days or fewer before the start, or after the programme has begun: no refund is due, because the seat can no longer be resold and the cohort cost is committed.
• Residency only — visa refusal: if the Hong Kong Immigration Department refuses your Entry for Training visa, we refund everything you have paid in full on presentation of the refusal notice. Government fees, flights, insurance and accommodation are not refundable by us.
• We cancel, postpone or cannot seat you: you choose between a full refund of everything paid and a free transfer to the next cohort.
• Transfers: one free transfer to a later cohort if you ask more than 14 days before the start. Later transfers are at our discretion and subject to seat availability.
• Refunds are made to the original payment method within 14 business days of us agreeing them, in the currency originally paid. We do not reimburse exchange-rate movements or card-issuer fees.
• Nothing in this section limits any right you have under Hong Kong law that cannot lawfully be excluded.

6. Attendance, conduct and lab safety

You are working next to live industrial equipment. Safety rules are not optional.

• The Certificate of Attendance requires attendance of at least 80% of scheduled contact hours. We will tell you in writing if your attendance puts the certificate at risk.
• You must follow the safety instructions of lab staff at all times, respect the marked safety zones, use the guarding and e-stops provided, and never operate a cobot outside a supervised session or override a safety function.
• You must not bring unauthorised people into the lab, remove equipment, or connect your own hardware to lab systems without permission.
• We may suspend or remove a participant, without refund, for behaviour that endangers people or equipment, for harassment or discrimination, for theft of equipment or intellectual property, for breach of confidentiality, or for illegal acts. We will always state the reason in writing.
• Where a removal is for a lesser breach and no harm was caused, we will apply section 5 as if you had cancelled on that date, rather than forfeiting everything.

7. Visa and immigration (Residency and other overseas participants)

Conditions of stay for visitors to Hong Kong prohibit taking up study. If you travel from outside Hong Kong for a structured full-time programme you should hold an Entry for Training visa or another entry arrangement that permits it, rather than relying on a visitor stamp.

SMERT.AI Limited acts as your local training sponsor and issues the invitation and sponsorship letter after your deposit is paid. We will help you assemble the application, but we are not immigration advisers and we do not file on your behalf.

Every entry decision rests solely with the Hong Kong Immigration Department. You are responsible for confirming the requirements for your own passport and circumstances, for complying with the conditions of your stay, and for your travel, insurance and accommodation.

If your visa is refused, the refund in section 5 applies.

Applications are accepted from participants worldwide, other than nationals of jurisdictions we are prohibited from dealing with under applicable sanctions — currently Afghanistan, Cuba and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

8. Intellectual property and confidentiality

We keep ours; you keep yours.

• SMERT owns its curriculum, slides, code, datasets, models, simulator and documentation. You get a personal, non-transferable licence to use them for your own learning and your own professional work.
• You may not republish, resell, share outside the cohort, or use SMERT materials to run a competing course or training business.
• You own the projects and code you create during the programme, except for the SMERT components they build on. You may use your work in your portfolio.
• You grant us a non-exclusive licence to show your project work, anonymised on request, in our own marketing and teaching materials.
• Anything you see about SMERT clients, deployments, pricing, unreleased hardware or source code is confidential. You must not disclose it during the programme or for three years afterwards.

9. Photography and media

We photograph and film in the lab for teaching records and marketing. By attending you consent to appearing in that material. Tell us in writing at any time — before or during the programme — and we will keep you out of new material and remove you from published material where it is reasonably possible to do so.

10. Liability

We run the lab with the guarding, procedures and insurance appropriate to supervised cobot training, and we keep the equipment maintained. You must follow the safety procedures in section 6; most incidents in a training lab come from ignoring them.

Except for liability that cannot be excluded under Hong Kong law — including death or personal injury caused by our negligence, and fraud — our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with your enrolment is limited to the total fees you have paid to us for the programme.

We are not liable for travel, accommodation, visa or relocation costs, for loss of earnings or opportunity, or for indirect or consequential loss.

You are responsible for your own travel and medical insurance. We recommend cover that includes training activities around industrial equipment.

11. Personal data

We collect the personal data you give us — name, contact details, payment records, and for the Residency, passport and travel details needed for the sponsorship letter — to run your enrolment, meet our legal and immigration obligations, and keep our accounting records.

We use Stripe to process payments (we never see or store your full card number), and standard email and cloud tooling to communicate with you and keep records. Data is shared with the Hong Kong Immigration Department only where the sponsorship application requires it.

We keep enrolment and financial records for seven years, as Hong Kong accounting and tax rules require, and delete marketing contact data on request at any time.

Under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486) you may ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or object to marketing. Write to hello@smertai.com or to 14/F Foo Hoo Centre, 3 Austin Avenue, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

12. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the courts of Hong Kong have jurisdiction.

Before either of us starts proceedings, we both agree to raise the issue in writing and to try in good faith to resolve it within 30 days — in practice almost everything is settled that way.

These Terms, together with the payment confirmation email we send you, are the whole agreement about your enrolment. Where a page on our website and these Terms differ, these Terms prevail. We may update them for future cohorts; the version recorded against your payment (currently v1.0) is the one that applies to you.