AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models

What happened

When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup this year, he didn’t think its data was worth much: the users were anonymous, the company just a few years old. But he’s since turned the firm’s digital archives into real money.

He’s netted roughly $25,000 for his code base and a still-pending amount (likely around $15,000) for the workspace data in Google, Notion, Figma, and Slack. The sale was brokered by a company called SimpleClosure, part of a new growth sector in tech: businesses catering to dying startups.

Estimates from Carta and AngelList show shutdowns rising between 26% and 56% annually in recent years, and an end-of-life ecosystem—including coaches, “death doulas,” and firms that help handle the legal, tax, and operational headaches of going belly-up—has emerged. Now tech undertakers are selling the data remains to AI labs.