Polyshares review: what sellers actually get

Polyshares sends two signals. Its public pages now say any company with real operating history qualifies, and that the depth of the record matters more than headcount or revenue. Criteria it gave brokers in October 2026 are stricter: 50+ staff, three years of history, and all five core systems (CRM, accounting, chat, email and shared file storage). Ask which standard you will be held to.

There are two ways in around that bar. Software firms may license just their code. And Polyshares says it actively wants companies that are closing, closed or bankrupt.

The published band is $100K to $2M+. Four unnamed deals appear on its track record page: $450,000 to a roofing company, $300,000 to a general contractor, $275,000 to a solar installer and $110,000 to a marketing agency.

Polyshares says the price turns on how long the operating history is and how much visible reasoning the records show, far more than on raw volume. It reads a sample before it prices anything.

Those are useful reference points for mid-sized service and trade businesses, which are often missing from other buyers' marketing.

Two points need to be settled in writing. Term: the track record page calls each deal a perpetual exclusive license, yet the data handling page and homepage describe a defined term, exclusive by default unless agreed otherwise. Listing: the homepage rules out any marketplace or listing, but the data handling page describes de-identified listings in a buyer portal, shown under a code instead of your name.

Records you keep for your own clients are left out, which is sound. Polyshares says an outside PII specialist strips names, emails, phone numbers, account numbers and addresses before Polyshares sees the sample, and that only two named people at Polyshares can see a company's identity next to its data. It does not name the PII partner, so ask.

An earlier homepage claimed Polyshares paid referrers nothing. Its referral terms as of October 2026 pay 6%. Any referral fee is paid by Polyshares, not taken out of what you receive. See our disclosure page for our own arrangements.

The footer says Polyshares, Inc., and the team page lists Nathan Mathews and Ryan Lock as its managing partners. Polyshares says Mathews founded or bought four companies, including Roofer.com, and that Lock built and sold Simplicity Solar. Missing: a state of incorporation, a street address and a phone number. A privacy page now loads, dated 20 October 2026, but it covers only website analytics. The terms link still returns a missing page. Ask for the legal entity and a contract before you share anything.

Polyshares calls itself a data lab. It says it buys a license to a company's working records with its own money, has the personal details stripped out, packages the result into datasets and supplies them to AI labs. You deal with Polyshares alone, and it charges you no fee or commission. It describes the deal as non-dilutive: no equity, no debt.

1. 1

   Three quick questions

   Pick the tools you use, give the company name and founding year, and create an account. Polyshares puts this at about two minutes.

2. 2

   Fill in the detail

   In the portal you add record counts per system, headcount by country, the share of data in English, revenue and whether you own the rights. No files are uploaded at this stage.

3. 3

   Sample and offer

   A partner reads an anonymized sample and sends an offer within one to two weeks of intake.

4. 4

   Sign the license

   Terms are drawn up right after the offer. Nothing leaves your systems until you accept.

5. 5

   Anonymize and deliver

   The outside PII partner strips identifying fields, then the data is delivered.

6. 6

   Get paid

   Payment arrives Net 30 to 60 once the data is approved, anonymized and delivered.

The strongest candidates have years of records across chat, email, files, CRM and accounting, and a team whose work shows its reasoning. Construction, engineering firms with lots of CAD work, law, accounting and finance fit best. It is also friendlier than most to companies shutting down.

We run the same checks on every buyer we rank. They take an afternoon and they protect the one thing you cannot take back: the copy of your records.

• Find the legal entity. A registered company name, an address and at least one named person. A Facebook form alone is not enough.
• Get the offer and the contract in writing before any export. A sample agreement tells you more than a sales call.
• Ask who strips personal data, how, and when. You should approve the method and see a sample before anything leaves your systems.
• Ask where the data goes. Which AI companies receive it, whether you are told, and whether it can be resold.
• Ask how everyone is paid. By you, by the buyer, or out of your deal. Referral fees are normal; hidden ones are not.
• Get a second quote. Terms from at least one other buyer is the fastest way to know if an offer is fair.