Published buyer band
$100k to $4MPaid to the company, by the buyer publishing the widest band in the market.
Archives,
licensed.
What we do
Archive Brokers licenses company archives to the labs training frontier models, and pays the business that made them. A closed company sells the whole drive. A trading company sells the part it has already retired: a system it switched off, a division it shut, the files that came with an acquisition. Both are paid the same way.
The line we hold
A licence, never a sale of ownership. One named buyer at a time. Anonymised before delivery. Payment within thirty days.
Closed companies · Wind-downs and bankruptcies · Retired systems at trading companies · Closed divisions · Acquired archives
What a company drive actually is
Buyers are not shopping for documents. They want a working archive with breadth and mess left in, because that is the only thing that shows how a real business operated. Whole company or one retired system, the test below is the same.
01
The whole drive, not the good bits
The unit is the estate, not the file. One company, everything it produced, in the folder structure it was already in. A hand-picked selection of the best documents is worth less than the same archive untouched.
02
Breadth across the business
Finance, legal and contracts, operations, sales and customers, internal correspondence, marketing, people. Three or more of those in real volume is the bar. One department's folder is not a company drive.
03
Years of ordinary working files
Not a highlight reel. The value is in what a company produced week after week for a decade, including the years nothing interesting happened.
04
The mess left in
Superseded drafts, revisions, three versions that disagree with each other, the file named final_v4. Buyers ask for this specifically. Tidying the drive before you send it destroys the part they are paying for.
05
More than one kind of file
Documents, spreadsheets, decks, mail files, drawings, system exports. An archive of nothing but scanned PDFs reads as a partial one.
06
System exports beside the documents
An accounting, resource planning or customer record export says what actually happened. A document only says what somebody wrote. Together they are worth more than either alone.
Their stated gate
20 staff, 3 yearsFour separate buyers publish a threshold. All of them use headcount and age.
What counts as an estate
3 of 7 areasBreadth across the business is the bar, not size. There is no upper limit on volume.
Cost to you
NothingNo fee, no retainer, nothing deducted. We are paid by the buyer.
How it works
From the first form to the money arriving. There is nothing to install and no engineering effort on your side.
01
You describe it
Ten questions, about four minutes. No uploads, no file access, no engineering work. A price range appears as you answer.
02
We write the teaser
Your archive gets a codename and a one-page description. No company name, no person, no town, no price.
03
We take it to buyers
One at a time, to the labs and the intermediaries already licensing this material. We ask for an answer inside a day.
04
You see the number first
What a buyer will pay and what they want in scope. You say yes or no. Nothing has left your machine yet.
05
Deliver, then get paid
You sign a licence. We handle the entity list, the anonymisation and the transfer. Payment inside thirty days.
Questions
The ones we are asked every time.
Why would anyone pay for our old files?
Models are trained on the public internet, which does not contain how a real company writes a bid, revises a drawing, or closes a month under pressure. That material exists only inside businesses. Buyers publish payout bands running from six figures into seven.
Should we clean it up first?
No, and this is the one thing sellers get wrong. Do not delete the duplicates, do not reorganise the folders, do not pull out the drafts. The superseded versions and the disagreements between them are a large part of what is being licensed. Send it as it sits.
What if it is only one department?
Then it is probably too narrow. Buyers score breadth across the business, and three or more areas in real volume is roughly the bar. One team's shared folder rarely clears it on its own, though it can if the volume and the years are unusual.
How is the number worked out?
Mostly two things: how many people the company had, and how long it traded. Then volume, how many parts of the business the archive covers, and whether you can still get an export out. The inventory shows each one moving the number as you answer.
Does it cost us anything?
No fee, no retainer, and nothing deducted from what you are paid. We are paid by the buyer.
Who sees the files?
Before you sign, nobody. Buyers first see a one-page summary with no name and no location in it. Your identity reaches a buyer only after you have agreed terms.
What if the business closed years ago?
That is the easiest case. No live business to protect, the rights are usually clean, and one person can normally speak for all of it.
We are still trading. Does that rule us out?
No. Trading companies sell the archive they have already stopped using: the accounting system replaced three years ago, a closed division, a product line that ended, the files inherited in an acquisition. Nothing live leaves, nothing current is touched, and the scope is written into the licence. It is a smaller yes than the whole drive and it prices on the same two things, size and years.
Which parts would we be licensing?
You decide the scope before anything moves. Common shapes: everything from a company that has closed, one retired system in full, one closed division or site, or one class of records such as projects, bids and contracts across a period you name. Anything you exclude is named in the agreement and never leaves. You are licensing the archive, not selling it: ownership stays with you throughout.
When do we get paid?
Within thirty days of delivering the corpus, out of what the buyer paid. Never before, and never on a promise.
Ten questions, about four minutes