In the humming new market for dead company data, not all code is created equal.
Like wines from rarer vintages, programming that’s less common – say, Ruby or C++ – can fetch top dollar from the AI labs and data labeling shops. Even better if you’ve got context from Jira, Linear or Figma, or the full loop of related emails, customer records and support logs.
But the chef’s kiss of primo ingredients? That would be a database of rare provenance – 100 million images of eyeballs, or a billion interactions with service reps.
“Scarcity is definitely more valuable,” explains my guide to this emerging niche, SimpleClosure co-founder and CEO Dori Yona. “There could be a codebase that’s a quarter of the size, but double the value.”
Back in April, Yona set off a stir when he announced a marketplace, called AssetHub, where closing startups could offload their source code and workspace data for cash. Yona told Forbes that the test version of his market had recovered $1 million for founders over the previous year, across nearly 100 deals.
Now, as SimpleClosure opens its AssetHub marketplace more widely to the market, bringing its ability to list and sell workspace data to general availability, Yona says his team faces a surprise challenge: keeping up.
“Everyone needs this data,” he tells Upstarts. “It’s overwhelming.” (If this sounds like classic startup founder salesmanship – our gut reaction is that it’s both. Yona’s good at talking about his book; it’s also a crazy market for fresh or proprietary data in AI land.)
Since April, more than 350 companies have listed on AssetHub, increasing the proportion of SimpleClosure ‘dissolution customers’ by tenfold, the company says. The number of prospective buyers looking to vacuum up their data, meanwhile, had grown by 9x.
Add it all up, and the company expects to return more than $10 million to listing startups by the end of the year, SimpleClosure says.
With the new companies on both sides of its marketplace, SimpleClosure now has some data on what types of info the AI industry wants the most – and what scenarios might lead startups to want to part with it.
Upstarts chatted with Yona exclusively about what the third kind of buyer emerging alongside the AI labs and data labelers; what kinds of data fetch the highest premiums; and where the market could go from here.
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