How to sell business data to AI labs
Establish that you own the records, take an inventory of what the operating history actually contains, get it priced by someone who will write the check, paper a bounded license, then approve and share it. Going direct to a frontier lab means a procurement cycle measured in quarters. Selling to a data lab that already supplies them collapses that to weeks.
In depth
Most deals die at the first hurdle, and they die quietly because owners assume the answer is yes. A company holds two kinds of material: its own operating record, which it owns outright, and material held on behalf of somebody else, usually a client under a master agreement that assigns ownership to them. The second kind cannot be licensed no matter how valuable it looks, so sorting this out comes before anything else. Any serious buyer will ask for a clean provenance chain, and a seller who cannot produce one has nothing to sell.
Owners also routinely misjudge what their own record actually contains. The systems that turn out to matter are rarely the ones people name first: support tickets, internal threads, quote revisions, field notes, and call recordings tend to carry more of the reasoning than the CRM or the accounting export does. What AI companies want is that working record rather than the polished output, since finished reports carry the answer with the reasoning that produced it stripped out. The question worth answering is not how many gigabytes exist but how many years of judgment are visible inside them.
There is no public price list for this asset, and the comparables that circulate publicly come from large publishers licensing catalogs, the wrong reference point for an operating business. A company can run a direct procurement process with a frontier lab, which is slow and rarely open to businesses of ordinary size, or it can license to a data lab that buys as a principal and already supplies those labs. Polyshares is the second kind: we quote a number and pay it, and nothing is contingent on where the data goes afterward.
The better structure is a license rather than a sale. A license grants defined rights over defined material for a defined period; the company keeps ownership, keeps operating on its own records, and can license again later. Once scope is approved and the data is shared, identifying fields are stripped before anything moves, and payment follows on net 30 to 60 terms.
Related questions
Does Polyshares buy company data, or broker it?
We buy it. Polyshares is the counterparty on the deal. We license the data directly from the company that produced it, pay for it ourselves, and supply the AI labs. Nothing is listed anywhere and there is no third party for the company to deal with.
When does the money arrive?
Net 30 to 60, once the data has been approved, shared, and anonymized. We do not pay for a record we have not seen, so the review comes first.
Can I talk to someone before filling anything in?
Yes. Book a call and someone on the team will walk you through the same questions the form asks. Most owners find the form faster.
Speak with someone on the team.
The intake tells us quickly whether there is a market for what your company holds. You will get a straight answer either way.
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