How to sell your business data to AI companies.

What AI companies are buying

Records of real work, and the decisions behind it. The kinds of data buyers ask for:

• CRM activity: leads, opportunities, pipeline stages, calls and notes.
• Invoices and bookkeeping: bills, payments, journal entries and the general ledger.
• Email: the back-and-forth of running the business with customers and vendors.
• Support tickets and bookings: what customers asked for and how it was handled.
• Code and PRs: how software changes get proposed, reviewed and shipped.

Buyers turn these records into practice tasks with known answers, like "reconcile this month," so AI can practice real work and be graded against what actually happened.

Who buys it

There are four parties in this market:

1. Your business produces the data every day just by operating.
2. An agent like Sanctus Data Labs inventories and packages it, finds buyers, negotiates and handles the contracts, on your side of the table.
3. Data buyers aggregate data from many businesses, clean and de-identify it, build training environments from it, and license the finished collections on.
4. AI labs, the large companies building advanced AI models, buy those collections.

The big labs buy in large, standardized collections rather than one business at a time, which is why most sales go through a data buyer.

Which businesses have data worth selling

Any industry, any size. The strongest packages come from businesses that are data rich and tech forward: they run on systems like email, booking, invoicing, accounting, banking, CRM and support software, and those systems hold a detailed record of how the work gets done.

A thirty-minute call about which systems you run is usually enough to tell whether there is a package worth building.

What your data is worth

A license pays $100K to $3M+. Where a deal lands depends on what is in your inventory, the scope you agree to share, and the exclusivity window you give the buyer. Buyers price from an inventory of what you have, not from the data itself.

The surest way to a real price is to put the same package in front of several buyers at once. A single owner negotiating alone tends to get the first offer.

How a sale works, step by step

1. Intro call. Thirty minutes on which systems the business runs on.
2. NDA and engagement letter. Signed before anyone sees anything. Then logins or admin invites to your systems.
3. Inventory and package. The data is exported and staged on your own infrastructure, counted and organized, with anything out of scope left out.
4. Shop it. The inventory goes to multiple buyers at once. The data stays in your environment.
5. Route and terms. Price, exclusivity window, scope and payment timing, agreed in writing.
6. Contracts, delivery, payment. Only after a signed deal does the data leave your environment. Then access to your systems is shut off.

See each step in detail.

Selling directly vs. using an agent

You can go to a buyer directly. But buyers do these deals every day and most owners do one, and they negotiate accordingly. An agent takes your package to multiple buyers to find a market price and handles the contract work.

With Sanctus Data Labs there are two routes. In the first, you sign with the buyer, the buyer pays you, and we act as your agent for a fee agreed in writing up front. In the second, we buy from you at a fixed price and sublicense, carrying the buyer contract and the risk ourselves. Compare the two routes.

Privacy, and what you give up

Customer names, companies and contact details are masked before anything moves. The data buyers do the de-identification as part of cleaning and standardizing their collections, and anything you mark out of scope is left out of the package entirely.

You keep ownership of your business and all its records, and every system keeps running as it does today. You typically give up the right to sell that batch to other AI buyers for an agreed exclusivity window.

When you get paid

Selling directly, the buyer usually pays 15 to 60 days after they accept delivery. Selling to us at a fixed price, we pay on the schedule in our agreement, and you know the number up front.

About Sanctus Data Labs

Sanctus Data Labs helps enterprise leadership and business owners sell their business data to AI companies. We are based in Arizona and work with businesses across the US. Why Sanctus · FAQ