Your code, tickets and Slack, kept together, are what AI labs are buying.

SaaS companies, startups and agencies that have shipped software for a few years: the founders, engineering leads and finance leads who decide what the company can license.

8

buyers quoted below on what they want from companies like yours

8 of 8

kinds of record below that the valuation measures or values

1

lot like yours among those a lab buyer chose on 12 Oct 2026

What companies like yours hold

What you typically have, where it sits, and whether the valuation can measure or value it. Buyers price what exists together, over how many years, and how well it links.

  • Code with its full history
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Private repositories on GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket with every commit, review and tag. The startup archive a lab buyer chose on 12 October held 65 repositories and 6.4M lines of code.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your code history exportCounted with code with its historyValue a codebasepriced on its own, per repository
  • Tickets and the work behind them
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Jira, Linear or GitHub Issues: requests, bugs and the change that closed each one. That archive held 13.7K tickets.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your tickets exportCounted with tickets and projects
  • Team chat
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Slack or Teams channels and threads, where decisions were argued and made.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your chat exportCounted with conversations
  • Email
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes, with threads and attachments.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your email exportCounted with conversations
  • Documents and knowledge
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Google Drive, Confluence or Notion: specs, design docs, runbooks, postmortems, onboarding pages.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your documents exportCounted with documents and knowledge
  • Product analytics and telemetry
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Amplitude, Mixpanel, Segment or your own warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery). That archive held about 300M product and telemetry records.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from a CSV or JSON export
  • Customer records
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    Salesforce or HubSpot: accounts, deals and the notes on them.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your customer records exportCounted with customer records
  • Finance records
    Where it sits, and what the evidence shows
    QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite: invoices, payables, receivables.
    How the valuation reads it
    Measured from your finance records exportCounted with finance records

What buyers say they want from companies like you

In their own words, from their own pages or from reporting on what they bought. Each opens its source.

  • “GitHub Repositories, commits, PRs, and issues”
    MercorIts own page, 12 Oct 2026
  • “Source code, reviews, tickets, and the iteration history behind what shipped.”
    Turing (Project Lazarus)Its own page, 12 Oct 2026
  • “where we contacted the company and purchased their engineering repos”
    Scale AI (SWE-Bench Pro paper)Its own page, 21 Sep 2025
  • “Well-documented, production-grade codebases have licensed for up to $20,000 each.”
    HUD DataVendorIts own page, 12 Oct 2026
  • “Tickets, sprints, wikis, and complete project histories”
    TroveoIts own page, 12 Oct 2026
  • “Any owner of large, high-quality datasets in specialized content segments–such as code repositories–can express their interest”
    Google (Content Offer Pilot)Its own page, 16 Oct 2026
  • “This includes documents and files (reports, contracts, presentations), project management data (Jira, Notion, Trello), CRM and sales data, financial records, product analytics, internal wikis, and code repositories.”
    Ooak DataIts own page, 12 Oct 2026
  • “internal messenger chats, emails, video conference recordings and code change histories”
    AI labs, per The InformationAs reported, 14 Aug 2026

What raises the value

  • History, not a snapshot: "Buyers pay for production history and the context that travels with it" (Troveo, code guide).
  • A ticket tied to the change that closed it: "Connects a request to the change that resolved it and the outcome" (Troveo, code guide).
  • An unusual domain: "a fintech ledger or a logistics routing engine beats another CRUD app" (Troveo, code guide).
  • Code that runs, with tests wired in: Turing screens for "Minimum 50K lines of code" and a "Dockerfile that builds & runs in a container".
  • Code that ran for real users and was maintained by a real team.
  • Postmortems and design docs that say why a decision was made, linked to the alerts, tickets or commits they describe.
  • Analytics events joined to an outcome (a conversion, a cancellation, a support ticket), with event names that stayed stable over the years.

What lowers it

  • A code snapshot with no history: "A snapshot of source code with no history is worth little to a lab" (Troveo, code guide).
  • Generated files, duplicates and vendored libraries, which disappear once a buyer cleans the tree.
  • Common web or CRUD apps that many sellers already offer.
  • Code an AI assistant wrote: Turing's screen says "No LLM-written code".
  • Any code that was ever public: models have already trained on it.
  • Tickets with a title and no body, and tickets created by bots or bulk imports.
  • Analytics tracking that changed every quarter, or page views with no sessions.

A line that quotes a buyer names it. The others are our checklist, drawn from the factors buyers state in general: no buyer publishes how much each one moves a price. How often each factor matters across 156 kinds of data.

The rights to settle first

These stop a sale more often than price does. Each can be settled before any buyer sees a record.

The full rights checklist
  • Secrets and other people's data in the history. One operator who reviews exports found "live API keys, customer contracts, candidate notes, and pasted customer data in supposedly boring Slack exports" (r/startups, 27 Aug 2026). The valuation counts keys and tokens before anything is sent.
  • Slack's API terms say you may not "use API Data to train a large language model" (effective 10 Oct 2025). Use the owner-run export, never an API connector.
  • Code written by contractors without an assignment of rights, client-owned code at an agency, and copyleft components in the tree.
  • Customer names and incident details inside tickets and postmortems, and tickets customers filed under a support contract.
  • Export access is not a licence: "Your ability to export a record does not by itself establish permission to license it" (Nyne).
  • The seller carries the legal risk of the transfer: "Data partners remain responsible for ensuring that their transfer to Handshake AI complies with applicable legal requirements" (Handshake AI).

A recent purchase that fits

One of five lots a lab buyer went for on 12 Oct 2026, wanting to close in under a week. No price was given.

All five lots
Seller
VC-backed software startup
People
About 250 at peak
History
3+ years
Size
About 3.7 TB
What was inside
  • Email, Google Drive and Slack, 3+ years
  • 65 private repositories, 6.4M lines of code
  • 13.7K tickets
  • About 300M product and telemetry records

Source: A buyer-side referral network's announcement to its members, 12 October 2026 (reported to us).

What is already on offer from companies like you

Read this morning from the brokers' and marketplaces' own catalogues. A buyer compares your records with these; settled rights, more years and more linked systems are what set one apart.

Every lot on offer

184

lots on offer like yours

4.2 years

of history in the middle of them

11 of 47

say the rights are settled

What holders like you ask

Is our code worth anything on its own?
Yes, when it has its history. Scale AI bought 18 startups' engineering repositories for its SWE-Bench Pro benchmark; HUD DataVendor says production-grade codebases "have licensed for up to $20,000 each"; Turing says "Repos typically pay $10k–$100k+ depending on quality and complexity" and screens for at least 50K lines with tests. A snapshot is another matter: "A snapshot of source code with no history is worth little to a lab" (Troveo). The startup archive a lab buyer chose on 12 October sold 65 repositories together with their tickets, email, Drive, Slack and telemetry.
How is a codebase valued?
The valuation prices a codebase the way buyers price code: per repository, per reviewed change, per task and as a company's whole code base, from the code prices on record, each times how many the code holds, leaving out any buyer whose own published rules would not take it. Where the middle lands follows what code buyers ask for in their own words: tests in CI, reviewed changes tied to their tickets, code written by people, never public.
Do we have to sell exclusively?
No. Google's Content Offer Pilot, which names code repositories, says "This is a non-exclusive opportunity." Environment founders interviewed by Epoch AI put exclusive deals at roughly 4 to 5 times a non-exclusive one, so exclusivity is a price to negotiate, not a default. Watch the opposite clause too: micro1's terms have the seller warrant it has not licensed "the same Data on the same or substantially similar terms".
Do we have to send our data to get a valuation?
No. The valuation reads your exports on your own computer and sends only counts: how many records, over which months, how many people, how many link to another system, how many identifiers it found. No names, subjects or message text leave it. A de-identified sample, if you add one, narrows the range.
What do buyers do with a software company's records?
Most of it becomes practice environments, in which AI agents attempt real work and are scored. Epoch AI's interviews with environment builders and lab researchers: "Math and coding tasks came first, but we're now seeing significant growth in enterprise workflows: tasks like navigating Salesforce, filing reports, or manipulating spreadsheets." Scale AI takes "never the raw systems themselves, only structured, de-identified records."
How fast do these sales close?
The lab buyer that chose five lots on 12 October wanted to close in under a week (as a buyer-side referral network announced it). Speed favours the seller whose exports, rights file and de-identification plan are ready before a buyer asks, and most of that work can be done before anyone sees a record.

In this topic

What sells

  1. Start hereWhich data do AI labs want, and who holds it?Each kind of data the market prices, the businesses that hold it, what labs are asking for now and what they turn away.
  2. GuideWhat Are RL Environments? Who Builds, Buys and Prices ThemAn RL environment is a sandbox where an AI agent attempts tasks with tools and a verifier scores each try. Who builds them, who buys them and what they cost.
  3. GuideHow to Sell Videos to AI Companies: Prices, Buyers and RightsAI companies license video by the hour or minute. What buyers pay, which footage sells, and the rights you need in every frame before you sell a library.
  4. PageWhere data comes fromWho holds each kind of data, how much exists and how it reaches buyers.
  5. RegisterCompanies closingCompanies closing, sold or gone dark, and the records they leave.

Value the company's records, or a codebase on its own, measured on your own computer. Only the counts leave it.

Value your company's recordsValue a codebase
Selling a software company's data to AI labs | AIData.Broker