How investors can help portfolio companies recover value

When a portfolio company runs out of road, investors tend to focus on the orderly parts of the wind-down: the cash, the team, any asset sale. The company's operational data is usually treated as something to archive or delete. It can be an asset that is licensed for real money, and investors are often the people best placed to notice it before it disappears.

A software or services company that operated for several years has accumulated a detailed record of how it worked: chat, email, documents, tickets, code, CRM and support history. AI labs license this kind of data, anonymized, to train and evaluate agents that handle workplace tasks.

Imagine a 45-person B2B software company that raised two rounds, operated for five years and is now winding down. The codebase may attract little interest and the customer contracts may not transfer, but five years of connected chat, email, tickets, code and support history is the kind of record AI labs struggle to find elsewhere.

Typical licences range from $20K to $400K+. Where a company falls in that range depends on years of history, headcount, the number of systems and, above all, connection depth: whether the same work can be followed across several tools. For a company returning little else to its stakeholders, that can be a meaningful addition. We set out the broader case in turning a shutdown into a recovery for creditors and shareholders.

Data value falls off quickly once a wind-down begins. Subscriptions get cancelled to save cash, admin accounts belong to people who have already left, and providers delete workspaces after a lapse. By the time anyone thinks about the data, it may be gone. Timing matters walks through how this plays out.

Founders in the last weeks of a company are dealing with employees, customers, creditors and their own exhaustion. They rarely have the bandwidth to think about a new category of asset. An investor who sits on the board, or simply has the founder's ear, can raise it at the moment it matters: before the cancellation emails go out.

The most useful help is small and early. When a portfolio company starts discussing a wind-down, an investor can:

• Ask whether the company's operational data has been considered as an asset, and put it on the board agenda
• Suggest holding off on cancelling core tools until someone has checked what they contain
• Make sure admin access to each system is held by someone who will still be around
• Introduce the founder to us for a 15-minute call, so the decision is made with real information
• Help identify who will have authority to sign once the company is in a formal process

None of these commit the company to anything. They keep an option open that would otherwise close by default.

If you are not on the board, a short note to the founder is enough. Asking whether they have thought about the company's data before the tools are switched off opens the conversation without adding pressure.

A licence is the company's decision, made by people with authority over its assets: a director, officer, liquidator or assignee. Investors can raise the idea and help the founder evaluate it, but the scope, the exclusions and the choice to go ahead belong to the company.

Payment goes to the company entity, not to any shareholder directly. From there, proceeds are handled under the company's normal process, whatever that is in its situation. This is general information, not legal or financial advice, and the company should involve its own counsel on how proceeds are treated.

Founders will reasonably ask what happens to their former colleagues' information. The answer is a process built around consistent anonymization, default exclusions for HR, payroll, medical and privileged material, and a licence that bars buyers from contacting, profiling or re-identifying anyone. Boards often want to walk through those protections, and five questions your board will ask covers the common ones.

It also helps to be realistic about effort. The seller side takes about an hour in total, spread across an intro call, a read-only evaluation and a review of an anonymized sample. Payment follows in two to four weeks. That is a small ask of a founder who is already stretched, and it is worth saying so when you raise it.

Operating companies license data too. A healthy portfolio company may find a licence a useful source of non-dilutive revenue, and the same protections apply. Scope can be limited to particular systems or years, and specific clients or channels can be excluded entirely.

Investors with a large portfolio may find that several companies fit what AI labs are looking for, particularly those with long histories in a consistent set of tools. Smaller companies are not automatically ruled out either, as discussed in is my company too small to license its data. No firm number is given before the data is counted, so the only way to know is to look.

For funds that see wind-downs regularly, a consistent habit matters more than any single case. Adding a line about operational data to the fund's standard wind-down guidance means the question gets asked every time, rather than only when someone happens to remember.

If you would like a simple way to check whether a portfolio company's data is worth preserving, before or during a wind-down, we work with investors, boards and their advisors. Learn about partnering with us.