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AI training startup running a program paying 50 midsize companies $100,000 to $2 million for access to anonymized data.
No evidence-backed relationships are recorded.
Google outbid Mercor by $2.5 million for a dead airline's Teams messages, calendars and codebase. Leaders need a data-disposition position before the wind-down, not during it.
Reality
The Spirit Airlines bankruptcy auction put a price on a defunct company's internal records. The union's objection shows the scrubbing standard was written for customers, not staff.
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The $350m Series E values Snorkel AI at $3.5b, roughly nine times the annualized revenue it reports. What a customer buys now is a written evaluation rubric, a graded dataset and a sandbox to train in.
Reality
Google bid $10 million for Spirit Airlines' archive of emails, Teams messages and operational data. The aviation software company Springshot says part of that operational record was generated by its platform and was never Spirit's to sell.
Reality
Three AI data suppliers have pushed the price of a bankrupt airline's files from $7.5 million to $12.5 million in an auction with no comparables, and the court-appointed privacy ombudsman has not yet examined the new top bidder.
Reality
Mecka AI pays people to wear sensors while they make coffee or fix cars, and two people told TechCrunch that Sequoia is leading a round at about $500 million, three months after a $60 million round. The terms are not final.
Reality
One passing assertion on a three-line function covers 47% of its lines and catches 2 of 21 injected faults, which is the shape generated tests get accused of, though the harness measuring it needed eight fixes first.
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Micro1's late $12.5 million counter says the auction underpriced it. Either way, a liquidated airline's Teams archive now has a comparable, and every trustee's advisor has the number.
Reality
Spirit Airlines' archive of emails, Teams logs and source code drew three bidders in bankruptcy court. A judge rules on September 9 on whether the workforce inside it can be de-identified.
Reality
Hollywood creatives are paid $12 to $200 an hour to author the evaluation tasks that grade AI models. That price reflects their collapsed job market, not the value of what they sell.
Reality
The labeling startup went from $100M to $500M gross run rate, per TechCrunch. The take-rate arithmetic in that same disclosure does not reconcile, which deserves more attention than the growth curve.
Reality
Micro1's late $12.5 million topping bid for Spirit Airlines' internal records puts a number on operational archives. Every company with decades of email now has a valuation problem and a consent problem.
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