Closing, or just acquired? Your company's records are an asset, and the accounts holding them expire.

Founders winding a company down or selling it, acquirers holding records they will not use, and the assignees, trustees, liquidators and administrators who control an estate.

5

buyers quoted below on what they want from companies like yours

7 of 7

kinds of record below that the valuation measures or values

6

rights questions to settle before a buyer sees a record

What companies like yours hold

What you typically have, where it sits, and whether the valuation can measure or value it. Buyers price what exists together, over how many years, and how well it links.

  • Team chat
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Slack or Teams. cielo24 sold 13 years of Slack, Jira and correspondence when it closed (as reported).
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your chat exportCounted with conversations
  • Email
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. About 100M emails were the core of the Spirit Airlines archive.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your email exportCounted with conversations
  • Tickets and projects
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Jira, Linear, Asana or Zendesk.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your tickets exportCounted with tickets and projects
  • Code with its history
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    GitHub or GitLab repositories with their reviews and tags.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your code history exportCounted with code with its historyValue a codebasepriced on its own, per repository
  • Documents
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Google Drive, Confluence, Notion or SharePoint.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your documents exportCounted with documents and knowledge
  • Customer records
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Salesforce or HubSpot.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your customer records exportCounted with customer records
  • Finance records
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your finance records exportCounted with finance records

What buyers say they want from companies like you

In their own words, from their own pages or from reporting on what they bought. Each opens its source.

  • “Lazarus turns that operating record into a single payout of up to $1M, and handles everything else.”
    Turing (Project Lazarus)Its own page, 11 Oct 2026
  • “A fintech's fifteen-year operating history is worth more than a six-month side project.”
    Turing (Project Lazarus)Its own page, 12 Oct 2026
  • “Under a written mandate from that administrator, the estate can be rights-reviewed, anonymized and licensed as AI training data.”
    The General Data CompanyIts own page, 23 Jul 2026
  • “Private software written to ship, scaled to handle real users, and maintained by a real team of engineers.”
    SimpleClosure AssetHubIts own page, 12 Oct 2026
  • “Google won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' business data and software code for $10 million”
    Google, in the Spirit Airlines estate (Skift)As reported, 17 Aug 2026
  • “a note from Mercor offering to buy or license Warmly's code base and the records of its tasks”
    Mercor, to Warmly (AI Weekly)As reported, 15 Aug 2026

What raises the value

  • Years in the same systems: "A fintech's fifteen-year operating history is worth more than a six-month side project" (Turing).
  • Complete exports taken before the subscriptions lapse, with threads, attachments and history intact.
  • Records that link: a ticket to the commit, the thread and the customer who asked for it.
  • More than one bidder: the Spirit Airlines archive opened at $5M, sold for $10M, and drew a $12.5M offer after the auction closed (docket summary).
  • Someone with clear authority to sign: the officers while the company exists, the fiduciary once it is in insolvency.

What lowers it

  • Partial or late exports. The accounts are deleted on a schedule: Google Workspace: no recovery window stated; Jira and Confluence Cloud: 60 days; Microsoft 365: 180 days at most; Slack, if downgraded to free: one year, rolling.
  • A short-lived small team: a few months of chatter says little.
  • A private sale to one buyer: reported prices for shut-down startups run from $10K to $100K (Forbes, Apr 2026).
  • A plain mailbox archive with nothing linking it: 'ten years of emails' is worth 'less than you'd like', in one buyer's words (9 Oct 2026).

A line that quotes a buyer names it. The others are our checklist, drawn from the factors buyers state in general: no buyer publishes how much each one moves a price. How often each factor matters across 156 kinds of data.

The rights to settle first

These stop a sale more often than price does. Each can be settled before any buyer sees a record.

The full rights checklist
  • Employees and unions objected in the Spirit case that the content, not only the names, is confidential: "It does not address whether the contents of the record are confidential" (docket summary, 18 Aug 2026).
  • Consumers' records and emails were kept out of the Spirit sale because the privacy policy did not contemplate their transfer.
  • Who can sign changes as a company closes: once an assignee, trustee, liquidator or administrator is appointed, only they can.
  • A wind-down service is not your agent: SimpleClosure's terms say its authorisation "does not include any power of attorney or other authority to sign documents or enter into any agreement with any third party" (effective 6 May 2026).
  • Customer contracts can outlive the company: customer data your contracts reserve for serving that customer stays reserved.
  • Secrets and other people's data in the history. One operator who reviews exports found "live API keys, customer contracts, candidate notes, and pasted customer data in supposedly boring Slack exports" (r/startups, 27 Aug 2026). The valuation counts keys and tokens before anything is sent.

What is already on offer from companies like you

Read this morning from the brokers' and marketplaces' own catalogues. A buyer compares your records with these; settled rights, more years and more linked systems are what set one apart.

Every lot on offer

165

lots on offer like yours

6 years

of history in the middle of them

44 of 140

say the rights are settled

What holders like you ask

We are shutting down. Is our data worth anything?
Often, yes. Forbes reported that SimpleClosure did nearly 100 data deals for closing startups in a year, and that cielo24 received "hundreds of thousands of dollars" for 13 years of records. Reported prices for shut-down startups usually run from $10,000 to $100,000, mostly in private sales to one buyer. Years of linked records and a sale with several buyers are what move a company above that.
How long do we have?
As long as the software accounts keep the data. Google Workspace: no recovery window stated; Jira and Confluence Cloud: 60 days; Microsoft 365: 180 days at most; Slack, if downgraded to free: one year, rolling. Export everything while an administrator still has access, before any subscription lapses.
Which buyers take a closing company's records?
Of the 24 buyers on our board that take company records, 4 say they take closing or closed companies: Turing (Lazarus), Ooak, SimpleClosure AssetHub and Sunset. 5 name only operating companies (micro1, Handshake AI, Scale AI, Mercor and Nyne). In insolvency, The General Data Company works under the administrator's written mandate.
We were just acquired. Should we expect offers?
Buyers watch for acquisitions: Mercor wrote to Warmly eight days after its acquisition was announced, offering up to $300,000 for its code base and task records (as reported, 7 Oct 2026); Warmly declined. Whether the records are still yours to sell depends on the purchase agreement.
Does selling mean handing over employees' private messages?
No buyer should get them raw. Scale AI takes "never the raw systems themselves, only structured, de-identified records", and we do not take to market data whose value is who the people in it are. In the Spirit case unions objected that content, not only names, can be confidential, so private channels and direct messages are the part to decide on first.

In this topic

What sells

  1. Start hereWhich data do AI labs want, and who holds it?Each kind of data the market prices, the businesses that hold it, what labs are asking for now and what they turn away.
  2. GuideWhat Are RL Environments? Who Builds, Buys and Prices ThemAn RL environment is a sandbox where an AI agent attempts tasks with tools and a verifier scores each try. Who builds them, who buys them and what they cost.
  3. GuideHow to Sell Videos to AI Companies: Prices, Buyers and RightsAI companies license video by the hour or minute. What buyers pay, which footage sells, and the rights you need in every frame before you sell a library.
  4. PageWhere data comes fromWho holds each kind of data, how much exists and how it reaches buyers.
  5. RegisterCompanies closingCompanies closing, sold or gone dark, and the records they leave.

Value the records, or the codebase on its own, before the accounts that hold them close.

Value your company's recordsValue a codebase
Closing a startup: what its records are worth to AI buyers | AIData.Broker