When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup this year, he didn't think its data was worth much: the users were anonymous, and the company was just a few years old. But he has since turned the firm's digital archives into real money. He has netted roughly $25,000 for his code base, with a still-pending amount (likely around $15,000) for the workspace data in Google, Notion, Figma, and Slack. "At least all that stuff we were doing for two and a half years is worth something to someone somewhere," he says.
The sale was brokered by Simple Closure, part of a growing sector of businesses catering to dying startups. Estimates from Carta and Angel List show shutdowns rising between 26% and 56% annually in recent years, and an end-of-life ecosystem has emerged that includes coaches, "death doulas," and firms that handle the legal, tax, and operational headaches of going belly-up. Now these tech undertakers are selling the data remains to AI labs. Simple Closure added data sales to its services in April through its Asset Hub platform. Buyers include foundation AI labs, vendors that build simulated workspaces for AI training, and mature tech companies building their own models. Asset Hub has handled over 150 deals and expects to return more than $10 million to startups by the end of 2026. CEO Dori Yona says transactions once considered "somewhat taboo" are now routine, with 47% of Simple Closure deals including code or data sales.
Demand emerged suddenly last year as AI training labs hit the limits of public and synthetic datasets. Surge AI buys data to build "reinforcement-learning gyms" where AI agents practice tasks, from debugging complex IT architecture to drafting appellate briefs. Nick Heiner, who leads that work, seeks archives capturing a range of situations, including disagreements and tricky judgment calls. Real archives avoid errors common in synthetic worlds, but the extent of performance gains remains unclear, and pricing is highly uncertain.
Larger deals are also happening. This August, Google outbid the AI data company Mercor to buy decades of data from Spirit Airlines during its bankruptcy, including 100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages, and 176,000 employee records, for $10 million. Bloomberg reported in September that SpaceX's AI unit is weighing purchases from struggling startups.
Legally, the practice could be risky. Spirit's flight attendants' union objected on privacy grounds, and attorney Greg Ewing has called such data "legally radioactive." Suppliers and buyers say they scrub personally identifiable information, but Ewing notes that emails and calendars can still contain private details such as doctor appointments and school pickup arrangements.
উৎস: MIT Technology Review AI · সারাংশ: HeadlinesBriefing