About
We're looking for software companies with a real engineering history: private repositories that many engineers have worked on for years, with tests that still run. Live products, retired products and codebases from acquisitions all qualify, as long as the code has never been public. Teams that also kept their tickets, design docs and postmortems are an especially strong fit.
- Location
- Anywhere
- Company size
- 20–500 employees
- Track record
- 3+ years of commits
- Kinds of companies
- B2B SaaS, fintech, marketplaces, developer tools, healthtech, and internal platform teams at non-software companies
Is it a fit?
What we're looking for
- Private repositories that have never been public, mirrored or open-sourced
- 3+ years of commit history from at least 10 engineers
- 50,000+ lines of code the company owns outright
- Code written by people, with tests that run
Not a fit
- Forks or copies of open-source projects
- Student, hackathon or side projects, or code mostly written by AI tools
- Client work an agency doesn't own
- Repositories with a single author
Who knows companies like this
CTOs and engineering leaders, founders of acquired or wound-down startups, and investors with portfolio companies that have closed.
What the license covers
- Git history with branches and diffs
- Pull requests and code reviews
- Test suites and CI configuration
- Linked tickets and engineering docs, where they exist
Nice to have, adds to what the company earns
- Thousands of pull requests with review discussion
- Tickets, design docs, runbooks and postmortems from the same team
- Code in C, C++, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, COBOL or .NET
- Banking, insurance, healthcare, trading or blockchain software
- History that mostly predates 2025
- Openness to an exclusive license on part of the code
Tools we work with
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Bitbucket
- Jira
- Linear
- Confluence
Questions we'll ask the company
If the company can answer these, it is likely a good referral.
- How many private repositories do you have, and how many engineers have committed to them?
- When did development start, and roughly how many pull requests exist?
- Which languages make up most of the code?
- Has any of this code been public or licensed to anyone before?
How referrals work
- 1
Find a fit
Pick an open request and think of a company that matches.
- 2
Refer them
Share the company and a few details about it, in about a minute.
- 3
We do the work
We scope their data, agree a license and handle the export.
- 4
You get paid
Up to $30,000 per company, after their first delivery.
On this request
Up to $30,000
- 10% of what we agree to pay the company
- Confirmed when the company signs its data license
- Paid after their first delivery