For years, founders thought about company value in familiar terms: revenue, customers, IP, maybe patents.
AI is changing that equation.
At SimpleClosure, we’re building a fast-growing marketplace connecting companies with buyers looking for real-world data and code for AI training. Since launching AssetHub in April, 350+ companies have offered assets through the marketplace, representing nearly 500 million lines of code across 3,000 repositories, 1.7 million commits, 200,000 pull requests, and 3,200 contributors. In April we launched WorkSpace in beta, adding collaboration systems and docs, allowing us to increase returns to founders even further. Building the leading marketplace of real company data for AI training gives us a growing view into what buyers actually value.
What we’re seeing: company assets can represent tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in value, and potentially even millions at enterprise scale.
But more data doesn’t necessarily mean more value. We dug into our data to understand the characteristics of the highest valued assets. Here’s what we found.
What could your company's assets be worth?
Company size and history are a good starting point. More employees and more years operating generally mean more code, projects, decisions and proprietary data that could hold value.
We’ve helped facilitate deals in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for unique assets, including assets from companies that are still operating.
And there isn’t necessarily a ceiling. Larger companies with longer histories and larger bodies of usable data can represent significantly greater opportunities, with enterprise asset sales reaching into the millions.
But company size alone doesn’t determine value. What you’ve built, how differentiated it is and how difficult that data is to find can matter just as much.
Your assets may be bigger than your codebase
Buyers aren’t just looking for a dump of files. Increasingly, they want to understand how real work actually got done.
A product launch, for example, might span GitHub code, Figma designs, Jira tickets, Slack conversations and documentation in Drive. Together, those systems capture the decisions and iterations behind the final output.
Increasingly, buyers want to see that work in sequence, almost like a timeline of how a project moved from idea to decision to final output.
And that context is already sitting inside the tools companies use every day. Among the workspaces we evaluated, 95% use Slack, 87% Google Drive and 82% GitHub. Together, these systems capture the context behind the work, which is increasingly where buyers see value.
Surprisingly, AI tools were listed for sale in just 3% of workspaces today. We expect that number to grow as buyers increasingly seek data on how real-world companies use AI, and what business outcomes it can drive.
“The opportunity isn’t about selling everything a company has accumulated. It’s about identifying the work that’s genuinely proprietary, useful and difficult to recreate, and being thoughtful about what gets included. That’s where we’re seeing buyers place value.” - Dori Yona, Co-founder and CEO, SimpleClosure
Sellers remain in control of what’s included. Sensitive employee, compensation and health information is excluded, and sellers determine what is in and out of scope.
More code doesn't automatically mean more value
One of the clearest findings from our analysis: a bigger codebase isn’t necessarily a better one.
Across the codebases we analyzed, roughly 37% of raw code disappeared after removing third-party/generated code and internal duplication.
The takeaway here: breadth beats bulk.
Buyers care about what’s actually proprietary and useful. Testing, documentation, engineering rigor and differentiation can matter more than sheer line count.
You don’t need the biggest codebase to have a valuable one.
Scarcity can work in your favor
What buyers want most isn’t always what exists in abundance.
Our dataset spans everything from developer tools and fintech to enterprise SaaS, healthcare, media and industrials. Developer tools and infrastructure account for the largest share of code we’ve analyzed, although that may partly reflect the types of companies entering our dataset rather than buyer demand.
Buyers are often looking for what’s harder to find.
We’re seeing demand for data in industries like manufacturing, energy, banking and insurance, professional services and logistics, where real-world operational data can be much less abundant.
The same applies to code. Roughly half of what we’ve analyzed is TypeScript or JavaScript, making less common languages and specialized datasets potentially more interesting.
For founders, there’s a counterintuitive upside: being in a niche industry can work in your favor. And you don’t have to be an AI company to have data that’s valuable to AI.
What does an asset sale look like?
You don’t have to be shutting down to realize value from your assets.
If you’re still operating: licensing can create a new revenue stream while allowing you to continue using the underlying assets.
If you’re winding down: an outright sale can help capture additional value and return more to stakeholders.
In either case, the process is relatively straightforward:
The seller controls what’s in scope, and sensitive information is removed or de-identified before any data is licensed to a downstream recipient.
Your company may be worth more than you think
Years of building create more than a product. They create code, data and a record of how real work gets done.
How much those assets are worth depends on their scale, quality, differentiation and scarcity.
But there is now a market for assets founders may have historically left behind.
Before assuming yours are worthless, understand what you actually have.
So, what are your assets worth?
Find out what the code, data and work your company has built could be worth.
Get a complimentary asset valuation →
If you're looking to sell your assets: Learn more about AssetHub →
If you're looking to buy data: See how it works →
