How to sell your company's data to AI companies.

This is where most deals die, and it dies quietly because owners assume the answer is yes.

A company holds two kinds of material. The first is its own operating record, which it owns outright. The second is 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.

Sort this 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 routinely misjudge their own record in both directions.

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.

The question to answer is not how many gigabytes exist. It is 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. They are the wrong reference point for an operating business.

Two routes exist. 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 we pay it. Nothing is contingent on us placing the data somewhere afterwards.

The instinct is to sell the data. The better structure is to license it.

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. A sale ends all of that permanently in exchange for a single payment.

Scope and term are the two things worth reading closely. A bounded license should say exactly what material is covered and exactly what may be done with it.

A buyer will want to see the record before committing to a number. Nobody pays for material they have not examined, and an owner should be suspicious of anyone who offers to.

Once the scope is approved and the data is shared, identifying fields are stripped as part of preparing it. At Polyshares that work is ours rather than yours, and it happens before anything moves.

Payment follows on net 30 to 60 terms.