Not for sale
When a company dies, your data goes up for sale.
In 2026, a shut-down airline’s passenger records were sold to Google to train AI. It is not an exception. It is what a bankruptcy is for: turning every asset into cash, and your data is an asset.
From DNA to customer files, the promise a company made to protect your data is worth exactly what the company is worth on the day it fails.
We built Wysor so that our answer to that question could be different.
What happens when a company fails
A failed company’s data doesn’t get deleted. It gets sold.
In a bankruptcy, everything the company owns is an asset, and assets exist to be sold to pay creditors. Your data is one of them. Often it is the most valuable one left.
Passenger names, emails, internal chats
Spirit Airlines, wound down 2026
Slack history, email, documents, code
Shuttered startups, 2026
Everything of value, realised for creditors
Not an asset · Not for sale
Your messages. Your documents. Your client data.
Wysor is founder-owned, with no investors and no fund to repay. There is no estate to auction, and no one whose return depends on selling what you typed.
How it is allowed to happen
A promise to protect your data is worth what the company is worth on the day it dies.
GDPR does not exempt your data from the auction. It adds paperwork.
When an EU company becomes insolvent, the administrator’s duty is to turn its assets into cash for creditors, and a customer database is one of those assets. GDPR does not put it off limits; it adds conditions, such as notice and a window to object, and explicit consent before special categories like health data can change hands. When the Dutch travel site TravelBird went bankrupt in 2018, its receiver sold the customer database to a competitor, giving customers two weeks to opt out.
Penrose, NetherlandsA court confirmed your genome is a saleable asset
When 23andMe went bankrupt, the genetic data of more than 15 million people was put up for sale, and a judge ruled it could be. Traffic to the site jumped 526 percent in a single day as people rushed to delete their profiles first.
CNBC, 2025A promise not to sell did not survive the auction
RadioShack had told customers, in its stores and online, that it would not sell their information. In bankruptcy, 117 million records went to the block anyway. It took the FTC and 36 state attorneys general to force most of it to be destroyed.
FTC, 2015There is now a market for a dead company’s inbox
Shuttered startups are selling old Slack archives, email, documents and source code to AI companies at roughly $10,000 to $100,000 each, with one intermediary alone handling close to 100 deals in a year. Nobody who wrote those messages was asked.
Fast Company, Apr 2026The only data that cannot be auctioned is data nobody holds as an asset
Founder-owned, with no investors and no fund to repay, Wysor has no estate to realise and no one whose return depends on selling what you typed. Your data is not on the balance sheet, because it was never ours to put there.
Most companies that end up here did not set out to fail. They took venture capital and chased a scale they could not reach. Here is the math behind that.
Independent by design
We stayed independent so your data would never be an asset.
No ten-year clock
We owe no fund a return, so we are not forced to over-scale into a wall or bet the company on becoming a giant.
Built to last
We grow at the speed the business can actually sustain, which is the speed that keeps a company alive rather than the one that ends it in administration.
Your data is not inventory
It is not sitting on our books waiting for a creditor to price it. It is yours, and it was never ours to sell.
The promise rests on architecture, not just intent. Your data is encrypted, we do not train on your conversations, and the AI providers behind Wysor operate under zero data retention: your request is processed, then deleted. See how that works.