cielo24 sells 13 years of Slack, Jira and email to an AI buyer for hundreds of thousands of dollars

What was sold

cielo24 was a transcription and captioning company that has since shut down. According to a report by AI Weekly that relays Forbes reporting from April 2026, its CEO, Shanna Johnson, sold 13 years of Slack, Jira and email archives for "hundreds of thousands of dollars."¹ Slashdot's summary of the story attributes the same description to Johnson speaking with Fast Company: she sold Slack messages, internal emails and Jira tickets as training data for "hundreds of thousands of dollars."² I could not open the Forbes or Fast Company pages directly, so this page relies on those secondary summaries and on a Gizmodo write-up of the Forbes piece.³

None of the reports reviewed name the buyer or describe the contract. The price is therefore an unverified, seller-reported range and not a confirmed figure.

How the deal came together

The story sits inside a broader trend that Forbes reported in April 2026. SimpleClosure, a startup that helps companies wind down, told Forbes it had handled nearly 100 deals in the past year in which shut-down companies sold data, with payouts of $10,000 to $100,000 per company.³ Slashdot describes SimpleClosure as a company that helps businesses like cielo24 shut down.² SimpleClosure launched a product called Asset Hub that week to help startups sell internal data, and its CEO, Dori Yona, told Forbes: "There's a feeling of a gold rush from these companies trying to get their hands on real-world data."³

The buyers in this market are building what the Forbes piece calls reinforcement learning gyms, which are simulated workplaces where AI agents practice tasks. Gizmodo's summary says these environments use source code, documents, workflows and internal communications such as Slack messages and emails.³ The Information reported separately that Anthropic leaders had discussed spending as much as $1 billion on such environments, according to the same summary.³

cielo24's sale sits at the upper end of the range that SimpleClosure quoted. Johnson's "hundreds of thousands" is higher than the $10,000 to $100,000 per-company payouts SimpleClosure described, which suggests that a long Slack and Jira history was unusually valuable, or that the figure is a loose description.¹³

What went wrong or drew pushback

The main pushback concerned privacy. Marc Rotenberg, founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, told Forbes that the privacy issues were "quite substantial," adding: "It's not generic data. It's identifiable people."³ His group sent a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee urging the FTC to increase oversight of AI-driven businesses.³

Slashdot commenters split on whether employee chats are private. Some argued that workplace policies make them non-private, while others said personal information protections apply regardless of policy. One commenter argued that a bankrupt company's records are assets a trustee can sell to pay debts.² These are reader opinions and not legal findings.

AI Weekly also reports that SimpleClosure said it had processed roughly 100 such data sales in the past year with payouts of $10,000 to $100,000.¹ Gizmodo says "nearly 100."³ The difference is small, but the figure comes from the company itself.

Forbes reported that Yona said parts of Asset Hub were still in beta because removing personally identifiable information is a sensitive and technically difficult process, according to a summary of that article.³

What it means for companies with data

cielo24's sale shows that a small, non-AI company with long-running internal tools can have data that AI developers will pay for. It also shows how little is public about such deals. There is no named buyer, no contract and no way to check the price.

For a company considering a sale, four practical points follow. First, an archive's value depends partly on how long it covers and how it was used. Second, personal information in chat and tickets is the main risk, and the cost of removing it is part of the deal. Third, the timing of a shutdown matters, because wind-down firms say assets are worth most while the company is still operating.⁴ Fourth, a seller who discloses a price publicly may be doing so to market the sale, so look for corroboration.

For more on chat and ticket data, see /data/communications/ and /data/customer-service/.