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Can a shut-down startup sell its Slack, email and code to AI labs?

Yes. Startups that have closed are licensing their Slack, email, Jira and code archives to AI developers. In April 2026 Forbes reported that the wind-down firm SimpleClosure had handled about 100 of these deals in a year, with payouts of $10,000 to $100,000, and that one former CEO sold 13 years of a company's archives for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Updated 13 October 2026 · finData team

Why AI labs want a closed company's archive

A startup's archive shows how a team actually worked: how bugs were reported and fixed, how features were argued over in chat, how deals were negotiated by email. AI developers use that history to build simulated workplaces where AI agents practise office and engineering tasks. Forbes describes these as reinforcement learning environments, and reports that buyers are paying for the raw material to build them.

What deals have paid

Forbes reported that Shanna Johnson, the former CEO of the captioning company Cielo24, sold the company's 13-year archive of Slack, Jira and email for hundreds of thousands of dollars. SimpleClosure, which helps startups wind down, told Forbes it had done about 100 data deals in a year, paying $10,000 to $100,000 each, and it launched a platform called Asset Hub for listing these archives. Larger and older archives earn more. On our data partner's public price model, a 40-person software company with 6 to 10 years of email, CRM, support tickets, team chat, projects and databases comes out at about $115K to $230K (see the price guide).

What sells

Connected records are worth more than loose ones. Brendan Mahony, CEO of the wind-down company Sunset, told Forbes that a Jira ticket tied to a code commit is worth more than a standalone document, and that value depends on a company's size, age and what he called data richness.

Who owns the data after a shutdown

The records usually belong to the company, or to whoever takes over its assets during the wind-down, such as an assignee or a buyer of the company's assets. Employees generally do not own the messages they wrote at work. Ownership is only the first check. Customer contracts, NDAs and platform terms can still limit what you may share, and a guide from the law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz notes that Slack's API terms prohibit third-party application providers from using API data to train a large language model. Ask the lawyer or firm handling the wind-down before you agree to anything.

Privacy and your former team

Your former employees did not expect their messages to become training data. Marc Rotenberg of the Center for AI and Digital Policy told Forbes that removing names does not fully resolve that concern. Buyers and marketplaces remove personal details before licensing, and our data partner's security page says no de-identification method is perfect. Leave out private channels, HR records and anything you would not want exposed.

If your company is still operating

A shutdown is not required. Operating companies license de-identified copies of their records too, and keep the company and the original data. For a startup that has not raised in a few years, a data license is income that does not dilute the founders or investors. Read how the process works.

Questions

Can a startup that has shut down sell its Slack and email to AI companies?

Yes. In April 2026 Forbes reported that closed startups were selling Slack, email and Jira archives to AI developers. The wind-down firm SimpleClosure said it had handled about 100 such deals in a year, with payouts of $10,000 to $100,000.

Who owns a startup's data after it shuts down?

Usually the company, or whoever takes over its assets in the wind-down. Check with the lawyer or firm handling the shutdown before you sell anything.

Does a startup have to shut down to sell its data?

No. Operating companies license de-identified copies of their records too, and keep the company and the original data.

See what your startup's records are worth

Choose your staff count, years of records and systems, and get a range from our data partner's public price model. It costs nothing.

Get an estimate

finData introduces companies to our data partner, a marketplace that licenses business data to AI labs. If you license your data through them, they pay us a referral fee. You pay nothing. Details are in the questions on our home page.

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