Article

Who buys company records, and why

Last updated October 17, 2026

Owners hear that someone is paying for company records and assume it means the customer list. It doesn’t. A buyer pays to license records to train AI models. What it pays for is how the work got done: the arguments in the chat, the notes in the CRM, the exception someone handled at 6pm on a Friday. This page settles who is buying, why real records are worth money when public text is free, and what that means for a company of 30 or more people.

The short answer

There is one buyer on this page: micro1. It publishes its terms, so we can quote them. On 9 October 2026 it announced a commitment to spend $1 billion over the next 12 months acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data.

Why it pays comes down to one line in that announcement. “Real business operations involve incomplete information, competing priorities and exceptions that require judgment.” Public text doesn’t carry that. A company’s own records do.

Three things come before anything else. The records are de-identified before use. Customer names and payment details are never what is wanted. What is wanted is how the work was done. How an estimate became a job, how a change order was settled, how a repair was diagnosed. How a deal in the CRM was won or lost.

See if your company qualifies at micro1

Who is buying: one buyer, named

This page covers micro1 and nobody else. We write about one buyer per page so that every claim on it can be checked against that buyer’s own published words. If you want the general question first, whether a company can be paid for the records it already keeps, start with can a company get paid for its records.

micro1 runs what it calls its Company Data Partnerships program. Its data partnerships page opens with the plain version: “micro1 helps companies turn their operational data into new revenue.” And then the line every owner should read twice: “Every day, your teams generate operational data and business workflows that capture how work gets done in the real world.”

You didn’t create these records to sell them. You created them because 30 people can’t run a company on memory.

What micro1 says it does with the records

micro1 is specific about the use. It licenses de-identified company records to train AI models. In the October announcement it says what it builds from those records must “reflect real business operations,” and that the aim is to “learn to navigate workflows, make decisions, and complete complex tasks.”

In our own plain words, the records become a practice ground. A situation a real company faced is set up, an attempt to handle it is made, and the result is scored. The closer the situation is to a real working day, the more the practice is worth.

That is where your records come in. micro1 says that handling real business complexity “requires environments that preserve the context behind how businesses work.” The context is the part you have and nobody else does. Not the final invoice, but the six messages before it. Not the closed deal, but the three objections the salesperson logged on the way.

micro1 also says the $1 billion will “expand the range of industries and workflows represented” in those environments. More industries means more kinds of companies with records worth licensing.

Why public text isn’t enough

Here is our own explanation of why a buyer pays for records when the open internet is free.

Public text is written to be read by strangers. A how-to article, a manual, a trade association guide. It describes how work should go. It is tidy, it is general, and it leaves out the mess.

The records of a working company are written for colleagues. They describe how the work actually went. Say a commercial roofer with 40 staff, as a hypothetical. The manual says to measure, quote and schedule. The job file says the drone measurement was off, the second visit found two layers to tear off, the customer pushed back on the revised quote, and the project manager split the job into two phases to keep it. That gap between the manual and the job file is the judgment. It is the part no manual can teach.

Or take a service company of 60 that fixes commercial refrigeration, again hypothetical. The public text says what a failed compressor sounds like. The ticket history says the technician checked the compressor, found it fine, traced the fault to a relay three steps upstream, and wrote down why. Ten years of tickets is ten years of diagnoses, wrong turns included.

Nobody can produce that record to order. It only exists because the company ran for years and wrote things down as it went.

What micro1 says it looks for

micro1 publishes three kinds of data on its data partnerships page:

operational documentation: “SOPs, knowledge bases, internal documentation, CRM data, project histories, and QA processes”;
decision-making patterns: “How teams evaluate information and make operational decisions”;
people’s feedback: what experienced staff said was right or wrong about a piece of work, in a real business setting.

Its answer to “what types of data are you looking for?” is the one to keep in mind: “data that reflects how work is actually performed within an organization.” And: “The most valuable datasets capture real operational expertise, decision-making processes, and repeatable workflows.”

micro1 also lists six areas where operational data can contribute: software and engineering, finance and accounting, customer support, sales and CRM, legal and contracts, and operations and logistics. Its partner programme page adds “operational communications” to the list of high-quality operational data. That is the chat.

The Slack and Teams archive

The chat archive is the record owners forget they have. It doesn’t feel like documentation. It feels like noise. It is the closest thing a company has to a recording of decisions being made.

An SOP says what to do. The Slack thread from the week it was written says what else was considered, who argued for it, and why it lost. The SOP is the conclusion. The thread is the reasoning.

Say a construction company of 45 has used Teams since 2019, as a hypothetical. There is a channel per project, a channel for estimating and a channel for the yard. In the estimating channel, two estimators disagree about a bid, one posts a photo from the site, and they settle on a number with a contingency for the steel price. That is an estimate becoming a job, with the reasoning in the open. Six years of that channel holds thousands of those exchanges.

The exceptions live in chat too. The order that shipped wrong. The customer who called the owner directly. The change order that got approved by thumbs-up emoji at 9pm because the crew was on site at 7. Every one of those is a moment when the process didn’t fit and somebody made it fit. micro1’s word for that is judgment.

You don’t need to clean it up. The messy threads are the record, and de-identification handles the names.

The CRM

The CRM is usually the longest continuous record a company keeps. It starts before the first SOP and never stops. Every lead, every call note, every proposal, every reason a deal was lost.

micro1 lists “CRM data” among the operational documentation it looks for, and “Sales & CRM” as one of its six areas: “CRM data, sales processes, playbooks, customer lifecycle documentation, and revenue operations.” Its partner programme page says “CRM metadata.”

What a buyer learns from a CRM isn’t who the customers were. It is how the company sold. Take a hypothetical distributor of 50 with 12 years in its CRM. The won deals show which offers closed and how long it took. The lost deals show the reasons: price, timing, a competitor, a buyer who left. The stage changes show where deals stalled. The notes show what the salesperson tried next.

That is decision-making in order, with timestamps. The customer names are what de-identification removes. The pattern of how a quote turned into an order, or didn’t, is what stays.

Why $1 billion is worth reading closely

A number that size is easy to wave away. Read it for what it says, not for the headline.

micro1’s announcement says the commitment is “to spend $1 billion over the next 12 months acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data.” It says the program gives businesses “a new revenue stream from the operational intelligence they have built over years.” It names the outside capital financing it.

Here is our own reading of what that tells an owner. First, the buyer has a budget with a date on it: 12 months from October 2026. Second, the budget is for licensing as well as acquiring, which matches the published terms on ownership. Third, the buyer is looking to broaden the industries it covers. None of that means any one company gets paid. It does mean the buyer is actively looking, and has said so in writing.

We don’t know how micro1 will split the $1 billion between companies, and micro1 doesn’t publish that. The estimate can’t tell you either. It gives a range inside micro1’s published band, worked out from your years of records, your systems and your headcount.

How micro1 decides what to pay

micro1 publishes the factors. On its data partnerships page: “Compensation is determined based on the characteristics and value of the data being contributed.” The factors it names are dataset size and volume, workflow complexity, data quality, domain expertise represented, and the uniqueness of the operational knowledge. “Each partnership is evaluated individually.”

The same page shows three tiers:

$100k+ for qualified Enterprise Data Partnerships;
$500k+ for “large-scale operational datasets or ongoing participation across multiple teams and business functions”;
$1M+ for “highly unique, proprietary operational data.”

The partner programme page puts company compensation at “$100K-$2M+ for approved data packages.” And micro1’s own payout calculator page is honest about its limits: “Indicative estimate only. Final payout is determined based on data sources, volume, quality, access terms, and due diligence.”

Notice what isn’t on the list: revenue, profit, brand. The price follows the records. What moves a number inside those tiers is covered on how much company data is worth.

Who micro1 says qualifies

micro1 publishes the line. For its Enterprise Data Partnership, it is looking for “operationally mature companies with 30+ employees, established documentation, and high-quality operational data.” The partner programme page lists the requirements as “30+ employees,” “US Prioritized” and “Primarily English.”

On location, micro1 says it accepts referrals globally, but “current demand is strongest for companies based in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.” On language, it is “primarily looking for companies that operate in English,” with documentation, workflows and knowledge bases in English.

Why 30? micro1 doesn’t say, so this is our own explanation. Around 30 people, a company stops running on conversation. The knowledge base appears because new hires keep asking the same questions. The CRM appears because three salespeople can’t share a spreadsheet. The page for companies with 30 or more staff goes through that in detail.

De-identified first

This is the part owners worry about, so it comes before the money conversation, not after.

micro1 says, on its data partnerships page, that “personally identifiable information (PII) is removed when relevant.” It says that depending on the data, “certain datasets may undergo synthetic rewrites that preserve workflow structure while reducing direct ties to original records.” In plain words, the steps of the work stay and the people in it are taken out or replaced.

The other published protections, in micro1’s terms:

access is restricted to a limited number of authorised team members;
each company’s data runs through isolated pipelines, not commingled with other engagements;
data is retained only for agreed periods;
companies can review representative samples before the prepared data is used;
deletion requests are honoured according to the terms of the engagement;
staff with access use company-managed devices and follow security controls and training.

Read that against the customer list. The customer’s name, address and card number are not how the work was done. Neither is a payment record. What is wanted is the diagnosis, the revised quote, the settled change order, the note that says why. Our safety page covers this in plain words.

What the company keeps

micro1’s answer to “who owns the data?” is one sentence: “Companies retain ownership of their underlying data.” What that means for retention, deletion and the agreement itself is set out in do you keep ownership of your records.

The company keeps operating. The CRM is still your CRM. The Teams channels are still yours. micro1 describes data licensing, and the agreed retention and deletion terms decide how long its prepared copy is kept. The cornerstone page on what data buyers want from a trade business walks through the same split, file by file, for four trades.

How it works with micro1

micro1 publishes four steps:

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

micro1 also says that after a company is referred, its team guides the company through an initial interview to assess the fit. Companies that meet the criteria move on to partnership discussions, agreement and onboarding. Each of the four steps is walked through on how the micro1 data partnership works.

Before any participation, micro1 says, the company and micro1 define together the approved data scope and its boundaries, the security and confidentiality standards, the anonymisation and redaction requirements, and the internal approval processes and permissions.

What this means for a company of 30 or more

The records differ by business, so here are three, as our own description and not a list from micro1.

A contractor of 40 to 80 keeps its record in the estimating files, the project channels and the change orders. The bid versions show how a number was argued. The channel shows the site photo that changed it. The change orders show who approved what, and when. The CRM shows which general contractors kept inviting the company to bid, and which stopped.

A service company of 30 to 100, the kind that maintains equipment on contract, keeps its record in the ticket system and the dispatch history. Each ticket is a diagnosis: what the customer reported, what the technician checked, what it turned out to be. The dispatch history is the day being reshuffled when an urgent call came in. The chat is the technician asking the senior tech what to try next.

An office-based firm of 30 to 60, an agency or a professional practice, keeps its record in the CRM, the project tracker and the review threads. The proposals sent and the fees agreed. The scope that moved and the email that moved it. The review comments between a junior and a partner before work went out.

In each case the question is the same. For how many years, and how completely, was the work written down where colleagues could see it? Worth two minutes to see your range? The estimate asks five questions.

What is never included

micro1’s own words on this are short. Every partnership is designed around the organisation’s requirements, “with clear controls over what is shared, how it is handled, and what is never included.” Before any participation, the approved data scope and clear boundaries are defined together, along with the anonymisation and redaction requirements. micro1 settles what is excluded with each company before any participation.

Buyers commonly exclude 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. That is our own advice, not micro1’s. Ask micro1 before you apply if any of your records sit near those lines.

Two more things, also our own advice. Anything a client owns under contract belongs to the client, and only the contracts say which is which. And the names of staff and customers are what the de-identification step exists to remove; you don’t scrub them yourself.

Where we fit

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

Before you apply

Four things to settle first, as our own advice:

Count the people. micro1’s published line is 30 or more employees. Have the number ready.
List the systems and their years. The CRM, the chat, the ticket system, the shared drive, the old CRM you replaced. For each, how far back it goes.
Find the client contracts. Anything a client owns stays out, and counsel should read the contracts before the discovery call.
Don’t tidy up. The arguments in the chat and the lost deals in the CRM are the record. Leave them as they are.

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

Alex, TrustPast

Questions and answers

Who is buying company records?

This page covers one buyer, micro1, which publishes its terms. On 9 October 2026 micro1 announced a commitment to spend $1 billion over the next 12 months acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data through its Company Data Partnerships program.

Why would anyone pay for our Slack and our CRM?

micro1 says it is looking for data that reflects how work is actually performed within an organisation, and that the most valuable datasets capture real operational expertise, decision-making processes and repeatable workflows. It lists CRM data and operational communications among the data it looks for.

Does micro1 want our customer names?

micro1 says personally identifiable information is removed when relevant, that some datasets are rewritten synthetically, and that the anonymisation and redaction requirements are defined with the company before any participation.

Do we give up the records?

No. micro1’s published terms say companies retain ownership of their underlying data. Data is kept for agreed periods and deleted on request or at the end of the engagement, according to the agreed terms.

How much does micro1 pay?

micro1’s partner programme lists company compensation of $100K to $2M+ for approved data packages. Its data partnerships page shows tiers of $100k+, $500k+ and $1M+. micro1 prices each company; a published range is not an offer.