micro1 just committed $1B to buying company data. Yours could be worth $1M+.

When we first met Ali Ansari in 2022, he was building micro1 around a simple idea: use AI to help companies find and vet great engineers, through an AI interviewer paired with a marketplace for technical talent. We invested at the seed stage to back Ali, and it’s been fun to watch ever since.

What happened next?

Ali spotted a much bigger opportunity inside the original business. In early 2025, micro1 noticed data-labeling companies using its platform to recruit engineers for annotation work. Ali repositioned micro1 to serve that market directly. It now uses its AI interviewing technology to vet engineers, doctors, lawyers, and other experts who create the high-quality human data that frontier AI labs need to train and evaluate their models.

What happened post-pivot?

At the start of 2025, micro1 was a recruiting business generating roughly $7 million a year, according to Forbes. Eight months into the pivot, it crossed $100 million in annualized revenue. In September 2025, it raised a $35 million Series A at a $500 million valuation. TechCrunch reported a $500 million gross annual run rate as of August 2026, and the company now reports $700 million in ARR. This September, Forbes reported a new round of more than $100 million at a $4 billion valuation.

Where it’s headed

Equally impressive is where the business is going. micro1 is building simulated environments where AI agents practice real work, and those environments depend on real-world context. That’s why micro1 has been acquiring operational data, most visibly with a $12.5 million bid for a portion of bankrupt Spirit Airlines’ records, above Google’s $10 million offer.

That strategy just got much bigger. micro1 has announced a commitment to spend $1 billion over the next 12 months acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data through its Company Data Partnerships (CDP) program, financed with capital from Citi and Hercules Capital. micro1 uses de-identified company data to build reinforcement learning environments that reflect how businesses actually operate, with incomplete information, competing priorities, and exceptions that require judgment. The investment will expand the range of industries and workflows those environments cover.

Part of that program is aimed squarely at companies that are closing. micro1 is offering to pay US-based businesses with more than 50 employees that are going out of business up to $2 million for their data, and we think this matters for our community.

As seed investors, we know not every company makes it, and founders winding down a business often have few options for recovering value. The emails, Slack threads, CRM records, and code a company leaves behind have historically been an afterthought. CDP turns that institutional knowledge into value for the closing company’s founders and shareholders, and for the AI systems learning how real work gets done.

For founders and teams shutting down, it’s a meaningful option. With $1 billion committed over the next year, micro1 is clearly serious about it.

More on the micro1 Offering for defunct US businesses below.

micro1, an AI data company that helps leading AI labs train and evaluate their models, has launched Company Data Partnerships (CDP), a new program that pays businesses to license their operational data. The company is now seeking defunct U.S based businesses and companies winding down for partnerships that could unlock $1 million or more from qualifying datasets.

When a company closes, it leaves behind years of work: projects, decisions, customer issues, handoffs, and problems its employees learned to solve. That experience lives across internal documents, emails, Slack conversations, CRM systems, and codebases. It can remain valuable long after the business stops operating.

Through their Company Data Partnerships program, or CDP, micro1 pays companies to license operational data that can help AI models learn how real work gets done. They’re particularly interested in hearing from businesses that are winding down or have already ceased operations and still hold those records. Qualifying datasets can command $1 million or more, with compensation depending on their quality, uniqueness, and value. Explore the program.

The opportunity spans industries, from marketing agencies and retailers to software and cybersecurity companies. What matters is the experience captured in the data: how teams gather information, make decisions, handle exceptions, and move a task from start to finish.

Consider a customer issue that takes several days to resolve. An employee might check the account history in a CRM, find an earlier promise in an email, consult a policy document, and coordinate with engineering in Slack. Together, those records show how the problem was actually solved—including the detours and judgment calls that a polished instruction manual might leave out.

That is the kind of context AI needs to navigate complex work. In micro1’s public CDP discussions, the company describes using historical business data to seed realistic environments where AI systems can practice tasks. Your company’s records can help supply the connected context those environments need. More on how CDP uses company data.

Protecting the people represented in those records is part of preparing them for use. micro1 recently introduced flow-transform 1.0, a system designed to replace real identities with consistent synthetic identities while preserving useful relationships across a dataset. This helps retain the connections that make a workflow understandable as identifying information is transformed. Each partnership also establishes the approved data scope, handling requirements, and privacy controls; companies retain ownership of their underlying data. Read about technology.

For founders navigating a shutdown, operational records may represent an overlooked source of value. The business may be ending, but the experience your team built can still help shape what AI learns next.

Winding down a U.S. business that has—or previously had—more than 50 employees? We want to hear from you. Contact micro1’s CDP team to explore whether your company’s data qualifies for a partnership worth $1 million or more.

✍️ Written by Zachary and Alex