From dormant codebases to lasting value

When a startup shuts down, the code does not suddenly become worthless. It just loses a home. Every year, thousands of founders wind down companies after building real products. These are not demos or side projects. They are production systems shaped by real customers, real constraints, and real tradeoffs. Too often, that work ends up archived, abandoned, or deleted entirely.

Labelbox offers a simple, safe way to turn that dormant work into value, without ongoing obligations, exposure, or complexity.

A clean, founder-friendly transaction

Selling a legacy codebase should feel like closure, not risk. When founders work with Labelbox, the priorities are straightforward:

• A one-time transaction with no maintenance or support burden
• Clear authorization and tightly scoped usage for AI training
• Secure handling, sandboxing, and isolation to prevent downstream exposure
• No public attribution and no reputational risk

Why these codebases are uniquely valuable

Startup codebases capture something that is hard to recreate after the fact. Unlike open-source demos or toy repositories, startup codebases reflect reality. They capture:

• End-to-end systems spanning frontend, backend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure
• Real product constraints, technical debt, and imperfect tradeoffs
• Evidence of how software evolves under deadlines, user demands, and operational pressure

This is exactly the kind of complexity modern AI agents struggle with, and exactly what makes your code valuable.

That context often lives in:

• Pull requests, issues, and commit history
• Product documents, technical designs, and roadmaps
• Internal discussions that explain why tradeoffs were made
• Documentation, deployment details, and setup decisions
• Signals from users, usage, and product metrics

Taken together, this is accumulated engineering judgment. Even if the company did not survive, the learning embedded in the system is real.

What kinds of codebases are a good fit

The specific problem your startup worked on is less important than how real the system is.

What matters most is complexity that reflects how software is actually built and maintained. Codebases shaped by multiple collaborators, frequent pull requests, and an active issue history tend to capture far more of that reality than repositories developed by a single person in isolation. These systems reflect coordination, iteration, and tradeoffs made over time.

In practice, the codebases we see naturally span different layers of a product, including:

• Frontend applications
• Backend services and APIs
• Machine learning components
• Infrastructure and DevOps systems

You do not need all of these for your codebase to be valuable. What matters is that the system reflects real-world development, with the context and complexity that comes from building and operating a product with a team.

How Labelbox uses your code, at a high level

Labelbox works with fully defunct startup codebases to help train and evaluate advanced AI systems.

At a high level, these systems need to learn how to work inside realistic software environments, not just read code in isolation. Real products provide the complexity, messiness, and long-term structure that synthetic examples cannot.

Importantly, this work happens inside secure, controlled environments, with clear limits on how the code is accessed and used. The goal is learning from the structure and decisions embedded in it.

Preserving value, without reopening risk

Labelbox provides a straightforward path to monetize legacy code from defunct startups. The process is one-time and founder-friendly: no maintenance, no support, no public reuse, and no reputational risk. Just clear terms, secure handling, and closure that turns dormant IP into real value while contributing to the future of AI.

If you’re sitting on a codebase from a previous startup and want a simple, low-risk way to monetize it, get in touch with us.