My company is closing. Can I sell our data?

Often, yes. SimpleClosure, a wind-down firm, typically paid $10,000 to $100,000 per closing company, Forbes reported in April 2026. Outside bankruptcy the board signs off; once you file, the court does. Promises to employees and customers limit what can go.

What do we do before anything is switched off?

Stop the deletion clocks. Troveo’s September 15, 2026 guide warns that “once Slack, Notion, Jira, HubSpot or Zendesk lapses, the history in them is gone or locked behind a reactivation you may not be able to afford.” As of October 2026:

System	What a shutdown sets off
Microsoft 365	Removing a leaver’s license deletes their mail after 30 days unless a hold was set. After a cancellation, data “might be deleted after 90 days and will be deleted no later than 180 days after cancellation”
Google Workspace	A deleted user, with their Gmail, can be restored for up to 20 days. After cancellation, “your users’ Google Workspace data will be deleted and can’t be restored”
Slack	On the Free plan, “Messages and files more than one year old will be permanently deleted”

In a shutdown, routine offboarding deletes the archive one mailbox at a time, so keep accounts and paid plans until the exports are done (Can we include former employees’ mailboxes? covers holds). SimpleClosure’s April 14, 2026 guide says to start the asset inventory “in parallel with your dissolution filings, not after them.”

Who has to approve a sale of our data?

It depends on how the company closes:

How you are closing	Who decides	Source
Winding down, no bankruptcy	The board, since selling material assets outside the ordinary course “typically requires board approval,” SimpleClosure’s guide says. Stockholders too where the charter or investor agreements say so, and in Delaware for a sale of “all or substantially all” assets (a majority of the outstanding voting stock)	SimpleClosure; 8 Del. C. §271
A lender holds a lien	Often the lender too: check whether its security covers general intangibles and whether the loan limits asset sales	Is it legal?
Already dissolved (Delaware)	Still the company, which Delaware continues for three years (longer if the Court of Chancery directs) partly “to dispose of and convey their property”; claims are paid or provided for before “Any remaining assets shall be distributed to the stockholders”	§§278, 281
Chapter 7	A case trustee, whose main role in an asset case is to “liquidate the debtor’s nonexempt assets”	U.S. Courts
Chapter 11	The court: a debtor in possession selling outside the ordinary course “must obtain permission from the court”	U.S. Courts

Troveo’s guide adds that the buyer “will check that the IP is unencumbered and that the company still exists at the moment of transfer.” Which approvals your company needs is a question for corporate counsel, and for insolvency counsel if the company cannot pay its debts.

What changes if we file for bankruptcy?

The sale becomes public and court-supervised, and your privacy policy can bring in an ombudsman. Under 11 U.S.C. §363(b)(1), the trustee may sell outside the ordinary course only “after notice and a hearing.” If, in offering its products or services, the company gave individuals a policy prohibiting transfer of their personally identifiable information outside its corporate group, and the policy was in effect at filing, that information can be sold only consistently with the policy, or after a consumer privacy ombudsman is appointed and the court approves, “finding that no showing was made that such sale or such lease would violate applicable nonbankruptcy law.” The ombudsman can report on the privacy policy, privacy losses or gains and costs or benefits to consumers, and alternatives (§332).

The Code limits that information to identifiers such as name, home address, email address and phone number that an individual provided “in connection with obtaining a product or a service from the debtor primarily for personal, family, or household purposes” (§101(41A)).

In the Spirit Airlines case, Google was named the winning bidder at $10 million for de-identified business data at an August 2026 auction, and the package excluded passenger profiles and loyalty data (Bloomberg Law, August 17, 2026). The consumer privacy ombudsman’s September 8 report disclosed that Google had offered to narrow the personal data in the sale (Fortune). Hearings were rescheduled several times, and as of early October 2026 the sale still awaited the court’s approval (Moneywise, September 27; EPIC, October 2).

Can we sell customer data if our privacy policy said we wouldn’t?

Read the policy before you offer anything. When RadioShack’s customer data came up for sale in its 2015 bankruptcy, the FTC’s consumer protection director, in a May 18, 2015 letter to the consumer privacy ombudsman, recommended that it “not be sold as a standalone asset, but be bundled with other assets,” go only to a buyer “in substantially the same line of business,” and that the buyer be bound by the privacy policies in place when the data was collected and give notice and get affirmative consent before using it in a materially different way.

A records sale to an AI company usually meets neither of the first two conditions. If your policy promised not to sell or share customer information, expect customer records to be left out or stripped; Spirit’s package, for one, left out passenger profiles. Outside bankruptcy no ombudsman reviews the sale, but the promise still applies; Is it legal to sell company emails and records? covers FTC staff’s warning about changing terms after the fact.

What about our employees?

Their emails and chats are much of what is for sale. Bloomberg Law reported that the Spirit package held about 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chats and collaboration records. The flight attendants’ union told members Spirit proposed to sell “employment records, payroll records, emails, Sharepoint, and Microsoft Teams information” (August 18, 2026), and two more unions joined its objection (court filing). In an amicus brief it announced on October 2, the Electronic Privacy Information Center said “the sale agreement does not clearly state that it will protect employee data, only consumer data”.

The ombudsman rule above is written around consumers, so protections for staff come mainly from what you negotiate and from employment and privacy law your lawyer can identify. Three things a closing company can still do:

• Tell people while you can reach them. After the last day, former staff are hard to find.
• Leave out HR, payroll, health and union records by mailbox, folder and search term; Can I leave out certain customers, people or folders? covers the wording.
• Ask who de-identifies, and see a sample first. SimpleClosure says it excludes sensitive employee and health records; Sunset publishes no exclusions (checked October 2026). What does “anonymized” mean? lists what to ask.

Who buys a closing company’s records?

This page lists a provider only if its own pages name closing companies. As of October 2026, seven do:

• SimpleClosure and Sunset, wind-down services. Forbes reported in April 2026 nearly 100 SimpleClosure deals in the prior year and that Sunset buys “at similar prices.” SimpleClosure vs Sunset sets out who signs and what each excludes.
• Turing’s Project Lazarus, which said in December 2025 that it acquires repositories, design docs and wikis “from defunct startups”. Fortune reported in September 2026 that Turing’s CEO told The Information it had paid “an average in the tens of thousands of dollars” for each of five to ten codebases (profile).
• Troveo, whose September 2026 guide offers to license a closing startup’s archive, with the company paid on every sale.
• Appen, whose program page says “Wind-downs follow a faster path and can frequently license the complete operational history” (profile).
• DataVendor, HUD’s marketplace, whose selling guide opens “Shutting-down startups can sell codebases and internal data to AI labs for real cash”; AI companies buy listings through its checkout (profile).
• Scrimdata, whose partner page tells companies that are closing up their “operational history may be the most liquid asset you have left” (profile).

Bankruptcy sales draw other bidders. Mercor’s $7.5 million was named the backup bid for Spirit’s data (Bloomberg Law, August 2026), and micro1 later offered $12.5 million (Fortune, September 2026).

The figures above are what companies and reporters have said, not audited prices; How much is my company’s data worth? keeps them apart from operating-company ranges.

What do I do next, and in what order?

1. Freeze deletion. No license removals, account deletions or plan downgrades until the exports are done.
2. Export and count. Systems, years, mailboxes and channels, in a data inventory.
3. Read the documents. Privacy policy, employee handbook, customer contracts, loan and security agreements, charter and investor agreements.
4. Bring in counsel for the approvals, any insolvency and what to leave out.
5. Get the approvals. A board resolution, investor consents, a lender’s release, or the court’s order.
6. Compare more than one offer on who signs, what is excluded and when you are paid; the offer benchmark lays one out.
7. Sign before dissolution if you can, with deletion of the raw copy written into the agreement.