Can I sell my company's data to AI companies?

Yes, if your company holds the rights to its records, has kept years of them and they show how work gets done; some buyers add size minimums. As of October 2026, 25 companies publicly offer a way to be paid for such records, 22 of them to companies that are still operating.

What has to be true for my company to sell its data?

Four things, and only the last one is about size.

You hold the rights. “A company that holds data does not necessarily have the right to sell it,” Daniel Goldberg of the law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz wrote on October 1, 2026. His examples are other companies’ confidential information under NDAs and commercial agreements, and software vendors’ terms; in the Spirit Airlines sale, a vendor objected that records its platform generated belonged to the vendor. Providers screen for this too. Telegraph Lab, which is affiliated with Data Licensing Report, says fit depends partly on a business’s authority to license its records, and Polyshares treats data a company holds for its own clients as out of scope. If a customer contract or NDA limits how you may use that customer’s information, expect those records to be excluded or cleared first. Whether a particular contract allows it is a question for your own lawyer; Is it legal to sell company emails and records? lists the documents to check.

You have kept enough history. What counts is the history your systems still hold, not the company’s age. Handshake AI asks for three years in operation, Nyne for three or more years of operational workflows, and Miro Advisory describes qualifying companies as having five or more years of history in real systems. If your email or chat deletes on a schedule, your history starts at the oldest record you can still open. A data inventory finds that date for each system.

The records show how work gets done. Replay says it works with companies in every industry and that what matters is whether there is a record of how the work was done. Scale AI looks for real day-to-day workflows rather than demos or synthetic data. Quotes, approvals, schedules and invoices, with the email and chat around them, are that record. Why would AI companies want our emails? explains what buyers look for in them.

You clear any size minimum. Most providers publish none. Among ten providers with profiles on Data Licensing Report, as of October 2026:

Provider	Published minimum
Appen	None published (source)
Avelence	None to submit a profile (source)
Handshake AI	20 full-time employees and 3 years in operation (source)
Mercor	None published; it names eight industries (source)
micro1	30 employees; its application page says 30 to 200 (program, application)
Polyshares	None; any company with real operating history (source)
Replay	None; its price tiers start at 20 employees (source)
Scale AI	40 employees preferred, assessed case by case (source)
Telegraph Lab	None for direct applicants; its referral pages cite 20 or more than 30 employees and 3 years (program, referrals, partners)
Troveo	None published (source)

For example, a 60-person company with 20 years of records clears every number in the table. A 15-person firm clears none of them, but can still apply to the providers that publish no minimum. Does my company’s data qualify? covers what counts as data and what happens when older records are gone.

Is it selling my data, or licensing it?

Usually licensing, even when the email says “buy.” A license gives a buyer permission to use a copy of defined records for defined purposes, and you keep the originals. A sale transfers the records themselves.

The documents use both words, so read which one yours uses. Corpus describes a single non-exclusive data licensing agreement. License My Data offers either a non-exclusive licence placed with several buyers or an exclusive buyout paid once. SimpleClosure, which mostly serves companies that are closing, offers to sell or license their records.

A license can still work like a sale. Polyshares’ four published case studies are each a perpetual exclusive license, which is permanent and closed to every other buyer. If an agreement is exclusive and perpetual, you cannot license those records to anyone else, so weigh its price against what several non-exclusive licenses might pay. Words such as “license” and “grant” mean permission; “assign,” “transfer” and “all right, title and interest” mean the records change hands. Am I selling my data or licensing it? covers what happens to the copy when a deal ends and whether you can sell to more than one company.

Who would pay for my company’s data?

Mostly intermediaries that prepare the records and license them on to AI labs, not the labs themselves. The buyers directory groups the 25 companies Data Licensing Report lists by how each one works, as of October 2026:

Type	How you are paid	Listed	Work with operating companies
Licenses directly	It pays you, prepares the records and licenses them to AI companies	14	13
Introducer	It matches you with a firm that licenses and pays	4	4
Licensing agent	It licenses on your behalf, possibly to several buyers, and shares the revenue	2	2
Listing marketplace	You list a dataset and a buyer pays you	2	1
Wind-down platform	It sells or licenses the records of companies that are closing	2	1
AI company, direct	An AI developer pays you itself	1	1

The one AI developer in the directory is Google, whose pilot program pays developers and small businesses for code and other non-public content, VentureBeat reported on September 30, 2026; the report does not mention email or chat. Troveo vs Avelence shows how an agent and an introducer differ in practice.

If this is real, why haven’t I heard of it?

Because most of what has been reported happened in 2026, the stories that spread were about companies that had shut down, and deals with operating companies are kept confidential.

When	What happened
February and May 2024	Reported AI licensing deals involved platforms and publishers, such as Reddit’s with Google (Reuters) and News Corp’s with OpenAI (The Wall Street Journal).
October 2025	TechCrunch described how AI labs used Mercor to get “the data companies won’t share”.
April 2026	Forbes reported that startups that had shut down were selling old Slack messages and emails. SimpleClosure launched its AssetHub for closing startups the same day, and Troveo added company workflow data to its catalog on April 28.
June 2026	404 Media reported that Google was emailing Play Store developers with offers to pay for app code. micro1 announced a referral program for its company-data partnerships.
August 2026	Google was named the winning bidder for Spirit Airlines’ data, at $10 million (Bloomberg Law). Telegraph Lab’s website domain was registered (registry record), as was Corpus’s (registry record).
September 2026	The website domains of Avelence (record), License My Data (record) and Sell My Business Data (record) were registered. SimpleClosure said AssetHub was open to operating companies. On September 30, VentureBeat reported that Google was expanding its pilot that pays developers and small businesses.

Some of the larger programs are just as new. As of October 2026, Handshake AI was hiring the first five to ten sales reps for its company-data team, which its job ad calls “a zero-to-one build”.

The sellers stay out of the news by design. Handshake AI says partner companies are never identified, and License My Data says the owner’s company is never named to the buyer. The deals that do get reported are by companies that have closed, including bankruptcy sales, whose terms are filed in court. What has been reported so far is on Are AI companies really paying businesses for their data?

What should I do first?

Find out what you have and whether you can license it, before anyone sees a file.

1. Find the oldest record in each system. Email, chat, job or accounting software, shared drives. A data inventory puts the answer on one page.
2. List the contracts that limit customer information. NDAs, customer agreements with confidentiality clauses and your software providers’ terms. Is it legal? covers which ones to read and when to bring in a lawyer.
3. Keep exports and passwords in house. Several programs make a first assessment from a description alone: Corpus starts with a two-minute manifest and no credentials or exports, and Polyshares’ intake asks for record counts rather than files. Who does the export later, and how long it takes, is on How much work is it to license company data?
4. If an email started this, check the sender. Someone offered to buy our company’s data. Is it a scam? sets out checks you can run in ten minutes.
5. Ask more than one provider. Conditions, prices and terms differ from one provider to the next, and how offers work explains why. The guide puts the whole process in order.