What company data sells for

Buyers’ published headline ranges

What each buyer says it pays, on its own page. These are claims, not deals, and each buyer prices after its own review. We cite buyers’ own pages as plain text with the date we read them, and don’t link to them.

What was sold or offered	Published figure	Source
Company records, priced by staff sizeReplay’s headline bands; it says head count is only a proxy. A buyer’s claim, not a reported deal.	$10K–$100K for 20–50 employees; $100K–$1M for 50–250; $1M+ for 250+	Replay’s own page, read 2026-10-18
Data programme for operating companiesDescribed by the buyer as indicative, subject to a full review.	$100K–$5M	Mode’s own page, read 2026-10-18
Company data licenceCorpus’s own headline figures, subject to its diligence. A buyer’s claim, not a reported deal.	Deals “start at $100K”; largest to date “$2M”	Corpus’s own page, read 2026-10-18
Data licence from a companyTelegraph Lab’s headline range, subject to data review. A buyer’s claim, not a reported deal.	$100K–$4M	Telegraph Lab’s own page, read 2026-10-18
Data licence from a companyHandshake’s headline range. A buyer’s claim, not a reported deal.	$100K to $4M+	Handshake AI’s own page, read 2026-10-18
Company data from qualifying businessesPublished by the buyer; it asks for 20+ employees and 3+ years in business.	“Six figures” (in dollars) for qualifying businesses	Nyne’s own page, read 2026-10-17
Licence of an operating company’s dataPublished by the buyer. The top tier is for “highly unique” data.	Tiers of $100k+, $500k+ and $1M+	micro1’s own page, read 2026-10-17
Data licence from an operating companyDescribed by the buyer as illustrative.	“$10K–$1M+” per agreement	Scale AI’s own page, read 2026-10-17

Reported deals and offers

Sales and offers reported by the press or by the sellers themselves. Few are public, and most involve shut-down startups rather than operating companies.

What was sold or offered	Published figure	Source
One data point: code and workspace data of shut-down startupsTypical payouts across 150+ deals by a wind-down service.	$10k–$100k per company	SimpleClosure, reported by MIT Technology Review
One data point: a small startup’s code, then its Slack, Notion and FigmaOne founder’s account; the workspace sale was still pending.	About $25k, plus about $15k	MIT Technology Review
13 years of Slack, email and Jira from one company	“Hundreds of thousands” of dollars	Forbes, via Slashdot
One data point: code and task records of an acquired startup	Offers up to $300k (all declined)	The Information, via FNNews

What labs pay environment builders

Not what data owners receive. It shows why realistic workplace records have value to the firms that build training environments.

What was sold or offered	Published figure	Source
One training task in an RL environmentWhat labs pay environment builders, not what data owners receive.	$200–$2,000; exclusive deals cost 4–5×	Epoch AI
A full RL environment: website replica to Slack-grade replicaBuilder pricing; shows how labs value realistic workplace data.	About $20k to about $300k	Epoch AI

Change log

Launches, price disclosures and term changes that affect this index, newest first, from third-party sources. The full record is in the market log.

1. 2026-10-16

   Above the Law criticises Mode’s programme for law firmsCriticism

   Above the Law argued that paying law firms for their email and documents asks them to sell privileged client communications, and that removing names does not remove privilege, which belongs to the client. It reports the programme takes firms with at least six employees and pays referrers the greater of $50,000 or 6% of a firm’s payment.

   Source: Above the Law, “Tech Company Launches Program To Pay Law Firms For Their Emails, Privilege Be Damned” (read 2026-10-18)

2. 2026-10-13

   Mode.Inc launches BizBuyData, a $5 billion data-licensing initiativeLaunch

   Mode.Inc announced a $5 billion “enterprise data monetization initiative”, under the name BizBuyData, to help businesses and nonprofits license their data to AI companies. The $5 billion is the headline of Mode’s own press release, not money paid out.

   Source: Business Wire, “Mode.Inc Launches $5 Billion Enterprise Data Monetization Initiative to Help Businesses, Nonprofits License Data to Leading AI Companies” (headline; the release page blocks automated reading) (read 2026-10-18)

3. 2026-10-13

   MIT Technology Review: AI labs are buying dead startups’ dataPress

   MIT Technology Review reported that foundation labs, vendors that build simulated workplaces and big tech companies buy the code, email, chat and documents of shut-down startups. SimpleClosure, a wind-down service, said it had handled more than 150 deals, that code or data now appears in 47% of them, and that it expects to return more than $10 million to startups by the end of 2026.

   Source: MIT Technology Review, “AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models” (read 2026-10-18)

4. 2026-10-09

   micro1 commits $1 billion to licensing company dataLaunch

   micro1 said it will spend $1 billion over the next 12 months buying and licensing operational data from companies, to build training environments for AI agents, with capital from Citi and Hercules Capital.

   Source: The Next Web, “micro1 commits $1bn to buy company data for training AI agents” (read 2026-10-18)

5. 2026-04-16

   Forbes: shut-down startups sell old Slack chats and email to AI companiesPress

   Forbes reported that companies are selling their old Slack messages, email and Jira tickets to AI companies. One, the transcription company Cielo24, sold 13 years of them for “hundreds of thousands” of dollars.

   Source: Slashdot summary of the Forbes report (Forbes is paywalled) (read 2026-10-17) · Forbes, “AI’s new training data: your old work Slacks and emails”