When a startup dies, its Slack archive goes on sale — one buyer is offering up to $300,000 for the chat logs
AI data companies have started buying the internal records of failed and acquired startups: Slack channels, email threads, Google Drive folders, project notes and Zoom recordings. Mercor, which supplies training data to major labs, is among the buyers, with individual offers reported as high as $300,000 for a company's archives. The reason is what the material contains. Bobby Samuels, chief executive of the data firm Protege, says labs have effectively exhausted the public internet and now need records of humans actually working with each other — the Slack thread where engineers argued about an architecture, the email chain where founders reached a decision, the messy middle of a project rather than its published conclusion. That reasoning-in-progress is what agents are being trained to imitate, and it is the part almost nobody publishes.
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