Article

A closed company’s records still have a buyer

Last updated October 16, 2026

A company that closes leaves more behind than the furniture. Years of Slack, email, project files and the CRM sit in accounts nobody has cancelled yet. A buyer pays to license records like these to train AI models. Here is what a wind-down means for those records, which ones count, what the founder keeps, and how it works with micro1.

What a wind-down leaves behind

When a company winds down, the people leave first. The records stay. The Slack workspace is still there. The mailboxes are still there until someone stops paying for them. The shared drive holds every proposal, every project folder and every post-mortem the team ever wrote. The CRM holds ten years of deals, with the notes on why each one closed or didn’t.

Most founders treat this as a cleanup job. Export what the lawyers need, keep what the accountant needs, cancel the rest. It’s a fair instinct. It’s also the moment the records are easiest to lose.

Here is what the cleanup misses. A company that ran for eight years with 60 people produced a complete record of how that work got done. Every decision is in there, from the first hire to the last invoice, and nothing is still being added. That record has a buyer.

See if your company qualifies at micro1

What a WARN notice means for the records

A WARN notice is required by federal law. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act covers an employer with 100 or more employees, not counting part-time staff. It must give 60 days’ written notice before a plant closing or a mass layoff. A plant closing is the shutdown of a single site where 50 or more employees, not counting part-time staff, lose their jobs within 30 days. The notice goes to the affected employees, the state and the local government.

For the records, the 60 days are the useful part. That is the window in which the company still has admin access to everything. Accounts are live. Exports work. The person who knows where the project archive sits is still on payroll. After the last day, every one of those gets harder, and some get impossible.

So the practical advice is short. Before the 60 days run out, export the Slack or Teams workspace, the mailboxes, the shared drive and the CRM. Put the exports somewhere the company, or the founder, controls. You don’t have to decide what to do with them yet. You only have to keep them.

A company that closes without a WARN notice is in the same position. The notice is a signal. The records are the thing.

Three ways the records get lost

We have watched the same three things happen, so here they are, as our own advice.

The subscription gets cancelled. Slack, the mailboxes and the CRM are billed per seat per month. In a wind-down, that bill is the first one someone cuts. The export takes an afternoon; once the account is closed, there is no export. Cancel the seats, keep the workspace, until the export is done.

The drive goes with the domain. A company that sells its name or its customer list often hands over the shared drive with it, because it’s all in one account. The buyer of the name wanted the name. The project folders went along for the ride. Separate them first.

The laptop goes back. The project manager’s laptop holds the only copy of the tracker export, and the laptop gets wiped for resale. Ask each of the last five people what they hold before their last day. Write the list down. It takes 20 minutes and saves the record.

Which records count

This is our own description of what a closed company usually leaves behind, not a list from any buyer:

the Slack or Teams workspace, every channel, with the threads where decisions got made;
the mailboxes, especially the shared ones: sales, support, projects;
the files: proposals, statements of work, specs, runbooks, post-mortems;
the project history: tickets, sprints, releases, the plan and what happened to it;
the CRM: leads, deals, notes, follow-ups, and the ones that went nowhere;
change requests, and the back-and-forth that followed each one.

micro1 publishes the kinds of data it looks for: SOPs, knowledge bases, internal documentation, CRM data, project histories and QA processes. micro1 decides what it licenses.

Say a software company of 70 people ran for nine years. Its Slack holds the engineering channel from the first commit to the last deploy. Its project tracker holds every ticket, with the comments where the scope was argued over. Its CRM holds 1,400 deals and the notes on each. Its shared drive holds 300 statements of work and the change requests that followed. None of that is on the website. All of it is the record.

Why a buyer wants a company that has closed

On 9 October 2026, micro1 announced a commitment to spend $1 billion over the next 12 months acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data. micro1 says it uses de-identified company data to train AI models on how real businesses work, including the incomplete information and the exceptions that need judgment.

Here is our own observation, not micro1’s. A closed company’s record is complete. Nobody is adding to it, so the buyer sees the whole arc. The last chapter is in there too: the quarter the numbers turned, the plan to fix it, the day the plan didn’t work. That is the part a running company never writes down, and it’s the part a reader of the record learns the most from.

Whether a closed company qualifies

micro1’s public pages describe the companies it looks for: 30 or more employees and established documentation. micro1’s partner programme also covers companies that have closed, with 50 or more staff at their peak. Peak, not final: on that line, a company that was 80 people in its best year and 12 on its last day counts as 80.

Established documentation, in our reading, means the work was written down as it happened. For a closed company, the test is simple: whether the exports exist. A company that kept its Slack, its tracker and its CRM has established documentation, whether or not anyone ever called it that. A company whose record lives in three people’s memories does not, and no application will change that.

micro1 decides at application. We can’t tell you yes or no. We can tell you where the published line is and show you a range. Worth two minutes to see yours? The estimate asks five questions.

What the founder keeps

Under micro1’s published terms, companies retain ownership of their underlying data. micro1 describes a data licensing arrangement. The founder who holds the records still holds them afterwards, and nothing in the published terms moves ownership to the buyer.

Who can sign for a company that has dissolved depends on how it closed and on the state. A company in a formal wind-down has someone with authority to sign. A company that simply stopped may not, until the paperwork says who. That is a question for your counsel, before you apply, not after. We don’t give legal advice, and neither does this page.

How it works with micro1

These are micro1’s published steps:

Get started. A short assessment to find the right partnership for the company.
Evaluation. micro1’s team reviews the submission and decides whether the company is a fit.
Discovery. If there is a potential fit, micro1 asks for more information and schedules a call to discuss the data and the privacy requirements.
Partnership. If approved, micro1 finalises the agreement and the data requirements, and the partnership begins.

On privacy, micro1 publishes these terms. Personal information is removed where relevant. Some datasets are rewritten synthetically, which keeps the workflow and reduces the direct ties to the original records. The anonymisation and redaction rules, the approved scope and the internal approvals are defined together before any participation. Access is limited to a small number of authorised staff, and each company’s data runs through its own isolated pipeline. The company can review representative samples before the prepared data is used. Data is kept for agreed periods and deleted on request or at the end of the engagement.

On money, micro1’s partner programme lists company compensation from $100,000 to $2,000,000 and above. micro1 prices each company. A published range is not an offer, and our estimate isn’t one either.

What this means for a closed software or services company

Software and services companies are the ones that close with the deepest written record, because the work itself was written down. This is our own description of what such a company usually leaves behind, not a list from any buyer:

the engineering channels in Slack or Teams, with the design debates and the incident threads;
the project tracker: every ticket, estimate, comment and status change, by date;
the release history, and the post-mortems after the releases that went wrong;
the statements of work and the change requests, with the reasons for each change;
the support inbox, and the knowledge base the support team wrote to stop answering the same question;
the CRM, from first contact to signed contract to churn, with the notes in between;
the runbooks and SOPs: how to deploy, how to onboard a client, how to close the month.

Say an agency of 45 people ran for seven years and closed when its two largest accounts left in the same quarter. Its records hold 600 proposals, 2,000 change requests and the Slack history of every account. It also holds the quarter when the accounts left, and what the team tried. A founder who kept those exports has something to show a buyer. A founder who cancelled the accounts in week one has a hard drive of invoices.

What is never included

micro1 says the approved scope, the anonymisation and redaction rules and the internal approvals are defined before any participation, with clear boundaries on what is shared and what is never included. micro1’s partner guidance lists what is never included: attorney-client privileged records, health information, payment-card and financial-account details, Social Security numbers, minors’ data, biometric data, and classified or export-controlled material. Ask micro1 before you apply if any of your records sit near those lines.

From our side, two more things, as our own advice. Anything a client owned under contract is the client’s, not yours, and it shouldn’t be in the export you keep. And the personal details of former employees and customers are what the de-identification step exists to remove; you don’t have to scrub them yourself, but you shouldn’t hand them around either.

Still operating? That is a different page

This page is for a company that has closed or is closing. If the company is still trading with 30 or more employees, the records are the same kinds, but the line is different and the questions are different. Read the page for companies with 30 or more staff instead. A company that is winding down over the next 60 days sits between the two; use this page, and count staff at the peak.

Where we fit

We, TrustPast, explain the process and give you a range with our estimate. Five questions, two minutes. The estimate is ours, not an offer. You apply to micro1 yourself, through the button below. micro1 pays us a referral fee. You pay us nothing. We never see your files.

Before you apply

Four things to do first, in order:

Find the exports. Slack or Teams, the mailboxes, the shared drive, the project tracker, the CRM. If an account is still live, export now, before it lapses.
Count the years and the people. How long the company ran, and how many staff it had at its peak. Those two numbers decide whether micro1’s published line is in reach.
Ask your counsel who signs. A dissolved company needs a named person with authority. Settle that before the discovery call.
Keep the records as they are. Don’t clean them up, don’t delete the embarrassing threads. The de-identification step handles names. The rest is the record, and the record is the point.

Then answer the five questions. If the range is worth your time, apply.

Alex, TrustPast

Questions and answers

Does the company have to be operating to apply?

micro1’s public pages describe operating companies with 30 or more employees and established documentation. micro1’s partner programme also covers companies that have closed, with 50 or more staff at their peak. micro1 decides at application.

Who owns the records once the company has closed?

Under micro1’s published terms, companies retain ownership of their underlying data. Who can sign for a company that has dissolved depends on how it closed; ask your counsel before you apply.

Do customer names and employee details go to the buyer?

micro1 says personal information is removed where relevant, some datasets are rewritten synthetically, and the anonymisation and redaction rules are agreed before participation.

What does it cost the founder?

Nothing. micro1 pays us a referral fee. You pay us nothing, and you apply to micro1 yourself.

How much does micro1 pay?

micro1’s partner programme lists company compensation from $100,000 to $2,000,000 and above. micro1 prices each company. Our estimate is a range, not an offer.