How to sell startup data when shutting down

Why failed startups are selling their Slack, email and Jira

AI labs want to train agents that can do real office work. To practice, those agents need simulated workplaces stocked with a real company’s Slack threads, tickets and email. Buyers call them reinforcement learning gyms, and a closed startup’s archive is a ready-made one (Gizmodo).

The deals so far:

• Cielo24’s CEO, Shanna Johnson, sold 13 years of Slack messages, internal email and Jira tickets as training data for “hundreds of thousands of dollars” while winding the company down (AI Weekly). She told Forbes the money took her from not knowing how the company would pay its bills to being able to wrap it up cleanly and walk away (Forbes).
• SimpleClosure, which handles startup shutdowns, processed about 100 data sales in a year, paying $10,000 to $100,000 per company (Fast Company). It says its AssetHub marketplace is on track to return more than $10 million to venture-backed startups by the end of 2026, and that its network of AI buyers grew ninefold compared with 2025 (SimpleClosure).
• Mercor emailed the CEO of Warmly about buying or licensing its code base and task records eight days after Warmly agreed to be acquired (AI Weekly).
• SpaceX’s AI unit has reportedly held informal talks about buying data from struggling and defunct startups to train its models (Gizmodo).
• At the far end, Google bid $10 million for Spirit Airlines’ internal business data in a bankruptcy auction (Frankfurt Kurnit).

Johnson also told Forbes she was still emotional about closing the company, then added:

Most startups will land in the low-to-mid range. More years, records that link across tools (a ticket, the Slack thread about it, the code fix) and a specialized industry all raise the price. For what buyers look for in general, see how to sell company data to AI companies.

Timing: sell before you delete anything

A normal shutdown checklist ends with closing accounts. Forgotten SaaS accounts can hold sensitive customer data and keep charging your card, so they do need to go (SimpleClosure). But once a workspace is deleted, the most valuable thing you own may go with it. Change the order:

1. Decide early. Raise the data sale in the same meeting where you decide to wind down. Buyers move fast, and your leverage drops as the final date gets closer.
2. Stop anything that deletes. Check retention settings in Slack, email and your helpdesk so old records don’t age out mid-process.
3. Keep departing employees’ data. In many tools, deleting a user’s account deletes their mailbox and files. Transfer ownership or export first.
4. Export with your own admin tools, then open the files to confirm they’re complete.
5. Keep paying for the systems that hold history until exports are verified and a buyer has reviewed a sample.
6. Then cancel and close accounts, and delete stored copies once the deal is delivered and your lawyer agrees nothing else needs keeping.

What to preserve

Buyers pay most for history that shows work from start to finish. Keep these before anything is cancelled:

Keep the paperwork too: customer contracts, NDAs, vendor terms, employee and contractor IP assignments, and your privacy policy. A buyer will ask whether you have the right to sell, and these are how you answer. If any records are under a legal hold or tied to a dispute, ask counsel before you move or delete them.

How you export matters. Slack’s API terms bar bulk export through the API and using API data to train large language models (Hunton). Prefer your own admin export over letting a buyer’s app connect to your workspace, and have a lawyer check the terms of your plan.

Approvals: board, investors and creditors

This part is not legal advice. Rules depend on where you’re incorporated, your financing documents and whether you’re in bankruptcy, so bring in a lawyer before you sign anything. Use this list to prepare for that conversation.

Who may need to approve

• The board. Ask counsel how the sale should be approved and recorded.
• Stockholders. In Delaware, selling all or substantially all of a company’s assets needs approval from a majority of the stockholders entitled to vote. The Delaware Supreme Court has ruled there’s no exception for insolvent, failing companies (Stradley Ronon). Ask whether your data sale, alone or with your other asset sales, crosses that line.
• Investors. Check your financing documents for consent rights over asset sales.
• Lenders. If you have a loan, check whether the lender has a claim on company assets, including IP and data.
• A court. In bankruptcy, the sale may run through a court process where others can object. Spirit’s data sale drew objections from its flight attendants’ union and from a software vendor that says some of the data is its own (Frankfurt Kurnit).

How the proceeds are handled

The money belongs to the company, not the founders. In Delaware, a dissolving company has to pay or make reasonable provision for creditors’ claims before stockholders get anything. It can wind up without court supervision, but then directors and stockholders can face liability if distributions to creditors aren’t done properly (Fox Rothschild). In practice, the sale price goes into the wind-down and is paid out in the order your lawyer or wind-down provider sets.

Two practical checks. First, confirm who can sign for the company while it winds down and after it dissolves. Second, get paid before final distributions, so the cash is counted once and paid out properly.

Your former team

The people who wrote those messages didn’t expect them to become training data, and privacy advocates have said so publicly (Fast Company). Remove names and identifying details, leave out HR, health and personal conversations, and decide in advance how you’ll explain the sale if former staff ask.

Where to sell: three routes

Each suits a different founder. In no particular order:

SimpleClosure’s AssetHub launched with source code live and workspace data (email, Slack, Notion, Google Drive) in beta (Business Wire). If a buyer has already contacted you, an offer in hand is useful leverage, but it isn’t a market price. Getting a second quote costs little and tells you whether the first one is fair.

Whichever route you pick, ask every buyer the same questions:

• Is this a sale or a license, and what rights do we keep?
• Who trains on the data, and can it be resold?
• When is the raw copy deleted, and do we get proof?
• When exactly do we get paid: on signing, on delivery or on acceptance?

Not shutting down? You can sell too

Shutdowns made the headlines, but they aren’t required. SimpleClosure has opened AssetHub to companies that aren’t closing (SimpleClosure), and operating companies license copies of their data while they keep running. You keep the original, pick what’s included and can rule out competitors as buyers.

That’s how Smelted works. Identities come out first, you approve every buyer, and you’re paid in as little as 7 days after signing, with nothing upfront. Licenses typically run $20K to $5M. Our 60-second estimate gives you a range, whether you’re closing next month or not closing at all.

Questions founders ask