Venture investors: selling data when a portfolio company closes

Individual deals are small: SimpleClosure's data sales mostly fall between $10K and $100K. It expects to have paid out more than $10M to startups by the close of 2026. A fund with several shutdowns each year will see those sums accumulate.

Shutdown services are one route. Pewter takes US firms that peaked at 20+ staff, closed or still closing, and several other buyers also go by the high point. Send founders the match quiz early.

Carta exited the shutdown business (its product was called Carta Conclusions) before 2025, and became an investor when SimpleClosure raised its $15M Series A. According to SimpleClosure, it calculates payouts from each company's waterfall and links up with cap table software.

For a fund, the data proceeds can then flow through the same distribution as every other asset, rather than being remembered after the cash is already paid out.

Per MIT Technology Review, money from a closed startup's data usually ends up with senior creditors and investors, while the employees whose code and messages fill the archive see none of it. The outcome for any specific company turns on its documents and creditor stack.

• Add "assess the data" to your standard wind-down memo
• Ask founders to keep workspaces paid until a buyer has sampled
• Collect peak headcount and years of history for each company
• Compare a shutdown service with a direct buyer for larger companies
• Route proceeds through the same waterfall as other assets