AI training company micro1 will spend $1bn over the next 12 months buying and licensing operational data from companies. The San Francisco company announced the plan on Friday. Citi and Hercules Capital are providing the capital.
The money goes through micro1’s Company Data Partnerships programme. The company uses de-identified company data to build reinforcement learning environments that reflect real business operations. In them, AI models and agents learn to work through workflows, make decisions and complete complex tasks.
“Real business operations involve incomplete information, competing priorities and exceptions that require judgment,” micro1 said in its announcement.
The company said the $1bn will widen the range of industries and workflows its environments cover. It said the initiative gives businesses a new revenue stream from the operational knowledge they have built over years.
What micro1 pays for
The programme’s page lists the data micro1 wants. That includes standard operating procedures, knowledge bases, internal documents, CRM data, project histories and quality assurance processes. It also wants records of how teams make decisions, and human feedback on AI outputs.
Payment depends on the quality, uniqueness and value of the data, the company said. The page lists three payment levels. A qualified partnership earns more than $100,000. Large datasets, or ongoing work across several teams, earn more than $500,000. Highly unique, proprietary data earns more than $1m.
Companies keep ownership of their underlying data. The company said it removes personal information “when relevant”. It may also rewrite some datasets synthetically to loosen their link to the original records. Companies can review samples before micro1 uses the data.
The programme targets companies with more than 30 employees and established documentation. The company gives priority to US companies, then other Western markets, and the material must be in English.
Bidder for Spirit’s records
The company calls itself a data lab that helps AI research companies and enterprises train frontier models and evaluate agents. It runs three in-house labs, one of them for robotics.
In September, micro1 made a competing bid for Spirit Airlines’ customer records. The court-appointed privacy official in Spirit’s bankruptcy has since backed Google’s $10m deal for that data. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has also weighed buying data from startups to train its AI models.