When a startup folds, the leftovers it once intended to erase can turn out to be worth something after all. Brokers now move that material, code and Slack logs alike, into the hands of AI labs that need lifelike training data.
Take Keelan Miskell, who wound down his crypto company this year. Two and a half years of work he assumed was forgettable, he found, meant something to somebody. The code base alone brought roughly $25,000, with more to come from workspace data in Google, Notion, Figma and Slack, likely near $15,000.
SimpleClosure brokered that deal, having added data sales in April. Over 150 deals have cleared through its Asset Hub, which projects handing startups more than $10 million by the close of 2026. Labs began hunting for this material last year once public and synthetic corpora ran dry; a real archive holds roughness a manufactured one lacks, from judgment calls to disagreements to dates tied to events that truly occurred.
Sunset, a rival broker, prices a dying client’s holdings by headcount, operating years, data volume, and how its team used its tools. Founder and CEO Brendan Mahony reaches for a mill analogy, calling the operational exhaust sawdust most people assumed was worthless when a great deal of value hides in it. Valuations stay loose because no one has published a comparison of real-world training against the substitutes, so one buyer’s quote can differ wildly from the next.
Money moves regardless. Google beat data vendor Mercor in August to buy Spirit Airlines’ records out of bankruptcy for $10 million: 100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages, 176,000 employee files. Spirit’s flight attendants’ union fought the sale over privacy, and one attorney advising AI startups brands such data “legally radioactive.”
