Shuttered Startups Sell Employee Chats

Failing or closed startups are monetizing their internal records — Slack messages, internal emails, and issue-tracking tickets — by selling them to AI labs as training data. Intermediary firms (e.g., SimpleClosure) are packaging archives and brokering deals paying $10k–$100k per company, with at least ~100 transactions reported. — This creates a novel, under‑regulated data market that threatens employee privacy, complicates consent and data‑provenance rules, and could seed models with identifiable workplace communications.