A San Francisco Muni bus emblazoned with Micro1 advertising drives on Mission Street. Stephen Council/BI

As AI labs go on the hunt for real-world data , Micro1 is throwing everything at getting it for them.

The startup is one in a new class of fast-moving data brokers, gobbling up companies' internal data and packaging it for the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic , and other model developers. The executives who sell their companies' data to Micro1 find themselves suddenly participating in a new sector of the economy, where terabytes of mundane workplace interactions can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ilya Brotzky, the CEO and cofounder of the recruiting startup VanHack, told Business Insider he was shocked when he filled out a Micro1 survey about his company's data and received a "substantial" offer.

"I didn't believe it, to be honest," he said. "I felt like it was a little too good to be true."

Micro1 says it pays $100,000 to $2 million for a single midsize company's data.…