Industry AI Minute Newsroom 2026-08-18

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.

Why it mattersNobody who wrote those messages agreed to this. Employees typed into a private workspace on the understanding that it was internal, and years later the company's remains are sold in a bankruptcy or acquisition with the archive attached. There is no notification, no opt-out and, in most jurisdictions, no clear rule saying the data cannot travel that way. If you have ever worked at a startup that folded, your working conversations may already be training data.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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When a startup dies, its Slack archive goes on sale — one buyer is offering up to $300,000 for the chat logs

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